Sheppard,1971

"Easy Writer"
R. Z. Sheppard
Time, 1 Nov. 1971, pp. 114-115.
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Escape literature is the term generally used to designate a chickenhearted conspiracy of writers and readers who do not want to face up to real life. But as playwright Tom Stoppard noted in his existential comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an exit is always an entrance some place else. One of the most original, whimsical escape artists in contemporary American fiction is Richard Brautigan, who is definitely some place else.

His best work, and effortless and lovely cloud of confetti about the decline of the sweet, the good and the pure, was called Trout Fishing in America. The main character was Trout Fishing itself—among the cleanest and most refreshing combinations of words in English. Unfortunately, this personification of a peerless gerund suffered a surrealistic metamorphosis that included its becoming a pen point, a legless alcoholic and a dinner companion of Maria Callas. At the end, Trout Fishing wound up in a junkyard as a used stream, for sale by the foot.

Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan explains, contains two chapters that were meant for Trout Fishing but somehow got misplaced just before the book was published. The first is "Rembrandt Creek," which "looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets." The second, "Carthage Sink," is about a "God-damn bombastic river" that suddenly dried up in mid-boast.

It is unlikely that readers of Trout Fishing noticed their absence. The two chapters are just as much at home in this collection of 62 stories as they would have been in their intended novel. In fact, it is not even necessary to separate Brautigan's prose into short stories or novels. All of his images, longings and humor eventually float free of their structural moorings and are kept aloft by the only thing in Brautigan that really counts—his special voice.

Loneliness, aloneness and loss are his particular loves. There are occasional notes of tinny sentimentality and studied coyness. But there are also funny fantasies casually conjured out of sad realities. For example, a depositor, fated always to select the slowest line at the bank, finds himself behind Siamese twins: "One of them is putting eighty-two dollars in his savings account and the other one is closing his savings account. The teller counts out 3,574 dollars for him and he puts it away in the pocket on his side of the pants."

Brautigan, a self-confessed minor poet, exploits his limitations to the fullest. Another original, poet Gary Snyder, has said that Brautigan's work consists of "flowers for the void." Lawn offers plenty of rosemary for remembrance and, if Brautigan harbors any bitterness for a world that now sells used trout streams by the foot, he certainly wears his rue with a difference.

Broyard,1971

"Weeds and Four-Leaf Clovers"
Anatole Broyard
The New York Times, 15 Nov. 1971, p. 39.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Years ago when I lived in the Village and had a 9-to-5 job, I used to eat breakfast at a place called Joe's Dinette on West Fourth Street. Most mornings, there was a guy named Dick in the next booth, reading The New York Times and chuckling over little items he found in it that amused him. As far as I knew, he didn't work, this Dick, and I wondered why he got up so early in the morning. Perhaps he didn't mind getting up because there was no job waiting for him to buckle down to, or maybe he went back to sleep after he finished chuckling over The New York Times. Whatever his reason, I know I both envied and resented his freedom, I would have liked to have leisure and the detachment to chuckle over The Times too—but I had to hustle off to work. This is how I feel about Richard Brautigan's stories. In fact, what I've just written sounds like a Brautigan story, right down to the inexplicable coincidence of both characters being named Richard.

Musing About Life
Brautigan sounds like a relaxed observer with all the time in the world to muse over the curious little turns life takes. Overheard remarks, incongruous occurrences, sense impressions, the shape of buildings or the look of people, the color of the weather—all this mixed in with memories, girls, places, jotting in a notebook, made by a man with nothing pressing on him, no compulsion to put it all in perspective, interpret it, drive it to the wall and ask "What does it mean?"

He can get 62 "stories" into a 174-page book that begins with Page 9. The shortest is three lines and the longest is seven pages. As you can see, there isn't much room for deep probing or sustained interaction. No sweat, man, you take it as it comes. Don't look at it too hard or you'll see beyond the moment, the two-penny epiphany, to the fact that these are just postcards, sent by somebody who's on vacation from life, a vacation he took a bus to, carrying nothing but a knapsack.

This doesn't mean that Revenge of the Lawn isn't fun to read. It often is. There are lots of nice things. A man who "looked if life had given him an endless stream of two-timing girlfriends, five-day drunks and cars with bad transmissions." A friend who burns his transistor radio on the beach because his wife has left and the music has gone out of his life. A man who is so fond of poems that he decides to take the plumbing out of his house and replace it with poetry. A sudden sight, on a beach near Monterey, of a group of "frog people," boys and girls dressed in black rubber suits with yellow oxygen tanks, eating watermelon.

There's a pleasant vignette of Brautigan watching a guy in the City Lights book store trying to make up his mind to buy one of his books. Finally be tosses a coin and the book loses. A really sweet piece—yes, I mean sweet—describes last night's girl getting dressed in the morning, disappearing, in due time, into her clothes and becoming a wholly adventure. There's another girl "sleeping in a very well-built blond way," until suddenly she starts to get up. "Get back in bed," he says. "Why?" she says. "Because you're still asleep," "Ohhh... okay," she said, cuddling up close.

Tinting With Literature
Brautigan has a good feeling for the American past, for small towns and the erosion of life styles, that is surprising in a man only in his middle thirties. But sometimes he's not satisfied to leave these quaint old snapshots alone and tries to tint them with literature. His longest story is about a boy going hunting in Oregon with his uncle Jarv. They stop in as small town, where Uncle Jarv writes a postcard and the boy stares at a nude Marilyn Monroe calendar on the post office wall. Somebody in the town has shot two bear cubs and a practical joker dresses them up—one in a white silk negligee—and sits them in a car. From this—the death of the two bears, the masquerade, the negligee, the calendar in the post office—Brautigan reaches all the way out into left field for Marilyn Monroe's suicide, years later, while she is still a cuddling little cub too, dressed up in death like a practical joke.

He does this too often for comfort. A story about a "crazy" old lady who fills her house with vases of flowers ends with a sententious bit of irrelevance: This was a month or two before the German army marched into Poland." Out hunting one day because he "just wanted the awareness of hunting," the first-person narrator is shocked to come upon an ugly shack, erected in what had always been virgin forest. Four small children without shoes come out on the porch of the shack to stare silently at him. It is raining and they are getting soaked, but they stand there, staring, silent. The author then nails up this heavy sign on their porch: "I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this."

He wins some and he loses some. Once in a while a piece will rise to poetry. Others never get beyond easy vignettes, light enough to blow off the page. At its worst, Revenge of the Lawn sounds, simultaneously, like a clumsily written children's book and a pretentious piece of avant-garde impressionism. At his best Brautigan is one of those odd-looking guys with long hair and granny glasses who sees, hears, feels and thinks things that make some of us feel he's found a better answer to being alive here and now than we have.

Duberstein,1971

"Revenge of the Lawn: Stories, 1962-1970"
Larry Duberstein
Saturday Review, 4 Dec. 1971, pp. 43, 49-50.
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For several years now, Richard Brautigan has been offering us his own peculiar tour of America: an economy package that hits all the low spots and never stays more than two or three pages in one place. As those who have taken previous Brautigan Tours will already know, his America consists exclusively of the Pacific Northwest, where it is always raining and California, where it is generally sunny. (Occasionally someone will slip off to an outlying province called Mexico for new sandals, dope, or an abortion.) While Revenge of the Lawn, a bustling collection of sixty-two short fictions, takes us back over this same terrain, Brautigan succeeds in making the scenery look new and stranger than ever.

In each of his modes—as poet, novelist, or short story writer—Brautigan is essentially an anecdotist, delivering bundles of bizarre incidents that strike him as funny, or touching, or stark and unsettling. The people involved in these incidents tend to be equally bizarre. In fact Brautigan pushes their eccentricities to the brink of caricature. If, as in the title piece, "Revenge of the Lawn", the author introduces us to his grandmother, then we should not be surprised if she turns out to be a six-foot, 190-pound boot-legger—the gay widow of a "minor Washington mystic" who dies insane. If the protagonist is a birthright millionaire, we can similarly take it for granted that he will wind up living in a room at the San Francisco YMCA. All of Brautigan's people are either disoriented from or exist in some pathetic relation to the American norms of Main Street. In Brautigan country, no one is straight.

Revenge of the Lawn exhibits considerable range and variety. "The Wild Birds of Heaven," in which poor Henley's credit is good because he is already $25,000 in debt, brings the surreal satire of Catch 22 to the suburbs. "Elmira," a haunting prose-poem of dream-travel, extracts the pure lyrical essence from a season torn from the author's personal calendar. "The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon" shifts smoothly from a celebration of old-time, small-town atmosphere and its broad frontier humor to a deft and sensitive afterthought. Some stories are merely tableaus; other are elaborate, extended metaphors. The "typical" Brautigan tale would have to be a mongrelization of all these modes.

The style is far less flexible. Even when he indulges in playful surrealism, Brautigan lays out a characteristically spare, almost hollow line, jarred from regularity by the odd, clinking similes with which he frequently punctuates a thought. (The image of a girl returns to him "like a pale marble movie.") Occasionally Brautigan's writing breaks down: stylistic ease borders on laziness, disarming wit slips into grating gimmickry, and the childlike tone simply sounds silly. In general, however, a strong instinctive craft secures the apparent effortlessness of his prose and a comic's keen sense of timing modulates the manneristic flights of imagination to an irresistible validity.

The stories set in the Pacific Northwest are the most substantial. Tacoma has a deep, somewhat mythic appeal for Brautigan, and he recovers the natural beauty of his childhood locale with considerable nostalgia—a nostalgia kept in check by his recalling the scene from much the same kind of sardonic remove as separated Mark Twain from Hannibal, Missouri. While Brautigan writes no Huckleberry Finn, he evokes a time and place surehandedly. A Deanna Durbin movie is playing just down the street from each drizzling Tacoma memory.

Tracking the ghost of his childhood through that Pacific mist, Brautigan tends to sound more like the Hemingway of the Nick Adams stories than like Mark Twain. ("Elmira is very beautiful but it is not a lucky place for me to hunt.") Yet as he fishes the Long Tom River for trout and plods the wet woods for deer it is the awareness of nature and not the challenge of the hunt that inspires him. He never seems actually to shoot at anything. And where Nick Adams's natural paradise is spoiled by intimations of mortality in "Big Two-Hearted River," Brautigan's is spoiled by the sudden appearance of a house "right there in the middle of my private nowhere," breaking a spell he has woven over himself. Thus he returns to the theme of Trout Fishing in America, where distant waterfalls turn out to be white staircases and where ten-room trailers from New York fill the Challis National Park. The beautiful and still entrancing illusion of America provides the occasion for satiric thrusts against the missuse of a continent.

The stories set in California are often shorter, lighter exercises. Here the Brautigan persona is an existential Lothario who is implicitly too busy living to spend a great deal of time writing about it. Nonetheless, a few of these pieces are extraordinary in their own right. "April in God-damn" treats a complex malaise with great concision and force, and "Coffee" goes straight to the heart of sexual loneliness between affairs. In fact, Revenge of the Lawn demonstrates that Brautigan is quite good at handling psychological materials not generally connected with his cult as a hipster wit. It is when he indulges that cult, rather than when he deals with his emotions, that he becomes saccharine and slick.

Revenge of the Lawn covers the period from 1962 to the present, and much of the most interesting work is not the most recent. Brautigan's extraordinary novel, Trout Fishing in America, was written ten years ago—a fact which its offbeat publishing history has obscured. What that bodes for the author's future as a writer is unclear, but this collection makes a nice summary of his past. It is one of Brautigan's best books, and at his best he is a writer of surprising talent and vision.

Normane,1971

"Revenge of the Lawn"
Gurney Norman and Ed McClanahan
Rolling Stone, 9 Dec. 1971, pp. 66, 68.
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GURNEY: The other day when the review copy of Richard Brautigan's new volume of stories came in the mail, Ed and I got into a discussion about whether or not Brautigan's stories belong to the literary genre formally known as "the short story." I said I thought they probably didn't, that they seemed to me too short to be short stories. (Of the sixty-two stories in the book, only half a dozen or so are over twenty-five hundred words long, and many are under five hundred.) Ed's reply to that was something like: Bullshit; Brautigan's stories are prime short stories, absolutely within the tradition of the modern epiphany as perfected in this century by writers like Joyce and Hemingway. Our separate halves of the hour of rap that followed seemed equally brilliant, though perhaps undermined a bit by the fact that neither of us had read the stories at the time. Since then we've both read them, and we both love them. But the question remains: are they "short stories" like your English teacher told you about short stories, or are they something else, something newer, perhaps something even better?

ED: As one of those very English teachers, I confess I fail to see what length has to do with it. Because although it's true that some of Richard's stories are indeed pretty short ("The Scarlatti Tilt," for instance, is thirty-seven words long, including the title), it's also true that in Hemingway's The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories there are at least half a dozen pieces that aren't appreciably longer. And you don't catch us English teachers going around saying he didn't write short stories.

GURNEY: As a matter of fact, though, length does have something to do with it. It's not everything, of course. It's not even the most important thing. But it is a factor. Length implies room for something to develop in. Character, action, ideas. I agree that it's possible to achieve development in thirty-seven words. But it's not usual. And even if it were usual, that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is whether or not Brautigan achieves development in the shortest of the pieces here. So let's look at one. Here's "Lint," fifty-two words long:

"Lint
by Richard Brautigan

"I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint."

The thing I have in mind is that the term "short story" is a particular name of a particular literary form, like "haiku" or "sonnet." The dictionary says a haiku is "a Japanese verse form in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively." A sonnet is "a poem of fourteen decasyllabic lines." The short story is nowhere near as fixed and rigid as those two forms of poetry. Indeed, critics and writers have been disagreeing about the elements of the short story since the genre was invented. But there's a lot of agreement about the short story, too. There is agreement that it is a genre distinct in form from the ancient narrative modes like the tale, fable, parable, and so on. There is agreement that it began in the midnineteenth century with Poe in America and Gogol in Russia, and has evolved through masters like Chekhov, Turgenev, Frank O'Connor, Katherine Mansfield, and more recent Americans like Eudora Welty and Bernard Malamud, and dozens of others, of course. I realize all this sounds pretty English-Departmenty. Is it relevant to Brautigan at all?

ED: Meanin' no disrespect, sir, but hell no, it ain't relevant. A "short story is plainly and simply whatever a short-story writer says it is, because however convenient such descriptive labels may be for critics and academicians, the artist has no choice but to insist that insofar as they have any application at all to his work they must remain eternally, infinitely elastic. Otherwise, they're meaningless—worse, they're in the way. So when Richard Brautigan calls "Lint" a short story, he's not violating the term, he's merely enlarging it, just as he enlarged the meaning of the word novel when he said Trout Fishing in America was one. Besides, the very fact that there is no "development" is precisely what "Lint" is all about. I mean the story's a perfect metaphor for itself, it's a Whole System, it excludes the very possibility of development!

And anyhow, why is it that so far we've mentioned only the two shortest, most constricted stories in the volume? If we don't watch it we're going to give our reader the badly mistaken notion that Brautigan is a miniaturist, that he'd just as well be putting in his time inscribing the Lord's Prayer on the heads of pins. How about a story like, say, "Forgiven," which is sure to take its place in the history of American literature as another "Big Two-Hearted River" in... uh... miniature?

GURNEY: Okay, it's your question, you answer it.

ED: Well, the thematic similarities between "Forgiven" and "Big Two-Hearted River" are as real as they are apparent: both are about solitary young men trout-fishing in streams in which they recognize some dark, mysterious power that fills them with a nameless dread when they feel it tugging at them. (Not uncharacteristically, Brautigan's sensitive, finely tuned hero flees the ominous place in panic, whereas Hemingway's Nick Adams permits himself only the merest hint of a mental shudder before he manfully turns his back on his forebodings and stalks away.) But the point is that in terms of both visual expansiveness and psychological complexity, "Forgiven" really does compare favorably to "Big Two-Hearted River." Just listen:

"Below the second bridge, which looked like a white wooden angel, the Long Tom River flowed into very strange ways. It was dark and haunting and went something like this: Every hundred yards or so there was a large open swamp-like pool and then the river flowed out of the pool into a fast shallow run covered over closely with trees like a shadowy knitted tunnel until it reached the next swampy pool and very seldom did I let the Long Tom River call me down into there."

Now it seems to me that the apparent simplicity of that passage is very deceptive, because for all its breathless brevity the language is emotionally powerful, the imagery rich and resonant. As a matter of fact, I think the density of the language throughout this volume provides the best defense to date against the argument that Brautigan's work is too often slight, fey, even cute. He is still Richard Brautigan, of course, and there are still moments when his natural impulse to be playful gets the upper hand and trivializes an idea. ("The Gathering of a Californian," for instance, is rendered almost indecipherable by such overly cunning similes as "like a metal-eating flower" and "like the Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter.") But by and large the language in this book has a density and power unequaled anywhere in his work, not even in Trout Fishing in America, and there is scarcely a page without at least one image—such as the "large unmade bed that looked as if it had been a partner to some of the saddest love-making this side of the Cross," or the Point Reyes Peninsula landscape "which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy constantly being circled by hawks," or the senile old lapdog that "had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death"—that if you yield to it, will break your heart.

GURNEY: I think your phrase "yield to it" is important, because Brautigan is not a hard-sell kind of writer. It's not his style to overload the senses. He very softly invites you into his fictional world. But once inside, indeed, your heart may well be broken, because within these apparently delicate pieces are people up against the ultimate issues of love, loneliness, and death.

"Coffee" is a story about loneliness. A man goes to visit a former girlfriend. She is not glad to see him. When he asks for a cup of coffee, she sets out a cup and a jar of instant coffee, puts water on to boil, then disappears into another room until he leaves. Then that night the man visits another ex-girlfriend. "What do you want?" she asks. "I want a cup of coffee." The second girl tells him where the instant is, then she too goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind her.

"I looked down the hall into the kitchen. I didn't feel like going into the kitchen and having another cup of coffee by myself I didn't feel like going to anybody else's house and asking them for a cup of coffee."

The story is only four pages long, but this lonesome guy's world is so fully rendered that the reader is inevitably sucked into it and made to feel pretty damn lonely himself. The story is powerful because it's about experience that everyone can claim as his own. Everybody gets lonely from time to time. And practically everybody drinks coffee. Readers can't help but be affected subliminally by its repetition throughout the story (twenty-one times in four pages). After about the tenth time the reader is damn near salivating, longing for the warmth of the cup in his hands, the hot liquid on his tongue, the vitalizing influence of coffee in his system. He wants coffee like the protagonist wants coffee, which is to say, he wants love and warmth like the protagonist wants it, from somebody on such a cold and lonely night as this.

ED: Exactly; it's the old shock-of-recognition trick, it's what pathos is all about, actually—epiphany too, for that matter—those painful, joyous moments when in the artist's experience, we recognize our own.

And that sense of recognition is just as vital to good comic writing of which there's an abundance in this book as it is to pathos. Consider the story "Complicated Banking Problems," for example: breathes there a man who, dropping by his bank to cash a small check, hasn't found himself standing impatiently in line behind his own version of Brautigan's little old lady in a long black coat (from which emanates a peculiar odor, "the first sign of a complicated banking problem") who insists on depositing in her savings account "the shadow of a refrigerator filled with sour milk and year-old carrots"?

Then too, of course, there is the other kind of comic writing, the rollicking, imaginative variety that depends on surprise and exaggeration, the sort of crazy, down-home burlesque that Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor—and Brautigan, it turns out—are so good at. Any reader who can make his way through the scene in "Revenge of the Lawn," Brautigan's title story, in which a gaggle of barnyard geese, having stoned themselves into a drunken stupor on sour mash in a moonshiner's basement, pass out and are taken for dead and plucked by the moonshiner's wife, only to awaken "in despair" with "devastating hangovers" and gather "in a forlorn and wobbly gang" in the front yard until the moonshiner drives up and, discovering the defrocked geese standing there beneath his pear tree "staring on like some helpless, primitive American advertisement for aspirin," smashes his automobile into the house and... well, anybody who can read that without cracking up wins my vote for the Grump of the Year award hands down.

GURNEY: I'm glad you cited Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. I think you can go farther into Brautigan off of them than you can off of someone like Hemingway, who is a little too one-tracked in his attitudes and concerns to delight me forever. Hemingway doesn't laugh much, but you'd never say that about Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, or Brautigan. Not that they are "happy" writers, by any means. Their fiction can be as heavy and as grotesque as life itself, but what's refreshing, as you say, is that they have a supreme comic sense as well as a tragic vision. They're double-edged, sharp on both sides. The fascinating thing about Brautigan is that he's more than double-edged. He's got more edges, more places to grab hold, than anyone else I can think of now writing. He's a poet and a novelist and a short-story writer. And then he's something else besides. He's a curious kind of inventor, which takes me back to what I said earlier: that, to me, the short pieces like "Lint" and "The Scarlatti Tilt" do not fit the genre of the "short story" as I understand it, while "Coffee" and, say, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" (which encompasses an entire lifetime in five pages) and several others most certainly do. Brautigan is one of those rare writers who can operate within traditional form and outside it. Most writers place themselves in one camp or another, seeking either to master an inherited set of rules or else to discover new ones. A story like "Coffee" is a story out of settled literary places. But when he writes that curious "Lint," I think Brautigan is out on the frontier of something. He goes out, and then he comes back in again. He plays in the interface, at that special meeting place of underground and overground, of the familiar and the avant-garde. The tension between those opposing directions is one of the main sources of the energy behind the stories in this volume, stories about common things told in very uncommon ways.

I think it's in there somewhere that Brautigan's enormous popular success is explained. He's popular because he is a man peculiarly of his time and place. He's a very contemporary guy. He's a California writer, and his perception is "stoned." He gets behind the little episodes of these stories, gets into the emotion behind the action, in a way that more intellectual writers seem incapable of, or at least not very interested in. Feelings flow freely in Brautigan's fiction, sweet feelings as well as bitter ones, and that makes it a rare commodity in a country as violent and repressed as the United States. As a California writer he stands as a kind of gift from the West Coast to the rest of the nation, which, judging from the enormous circulation of his books, is a gift the country willingly accepts.

And Revenge of the Lawn is the latest of Brautigan's lovely gifts to us all.

ED: Well, I'm sure as hell not about to quarrel with you on that. But I wonder if you'd care to arm-wrestle for permanent possession of the review copy?

Hendin,1972

"Revenge of the Lawn"
Josephine Hendin
The New York Times Book Review, 16 Jan. 1972, Sec. 7, pp. 7, 22.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Only Richard Brautigan could write so lyrically of the healing force of ice in the blood, or the quirky peace of the supercool. From the brilliant novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar to this first collection, Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, Brautigan has written sublimely of the way misery can turn into a joke, or anguish into a deadpan anecdote. For all Brautigan's characters are trout fishermen fishing for cool, freezing away every psychic ache, or looking for that cold, hard alloy Brautigan calls "trout steel." "Imagine Pittsburgh, Brautigan asks in Trout Fishing in America made out of trout steel, "the clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat." For Brautigan is the prophet of cities built out of ice rather than fire, of an America whose emblem would be no war-god eagle, but an elusive cold fish.

Revenge of the Lawn is really one vision of people who have drowned their feelings and live underwater lives. For Brautigan's fishermen do not want to catch trout so much as they want to be like them. Some of these stories are serene accounts of misery, others are shallow nothings, still others show people in the throes of learning that living can be nothing but losing. But every one of them is an encounter with an imagination so radical, so powerful, it can fade the very experience of anguish into a sweet mirage.

The title story is a deadpan masterpiece. With no emotion, a grandson tells of his gentle grandfather, a "minor mystic" who prophesized the exact date World War I would start. But the very anticipation of violence drove him mad. For the rest of his life, "he believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake." In Brautigan's world, this fantasy is war protest so effective it can replace the image of battle with a goody.

The grandmother, a flinty bootlegger, takes a lover who delights in destroying the lawn the grandfather created and loved. But, where the grandfather could not endure a fight and the grandson is stricken deadpan by everything, the lawn fights back. Becoming hard and malignant, it wreaks all kinds of havoc on the lover. Brautigan infuses so much violence into the lawn and so totally strips every passion from people, that his message is clear. Only a lawn could fight back. No human could survive the rage he would feel if he let himself feel at all; no one could endure the outrage life engenders. Brautigan's people always submerge their feelings, always retreat from turmoil into a child-like innocence or a coldness so total that no passion, not even love can intrude.

"Corporal" is a powerful account of how people get to be so cool. A poor schoolboy during World War II yearns to be a general. In a paper drive his school organizes like a "military career," he scrounges for scrap after scrap of paper, hoping to bring in enough to spiral from private to general. But after an incredible effort, he finds all his work will make him no more than a corporal. (Only kids whose parents were rich enough to have cars and to know "where there were a lot of magazines" get to be officers.) Crushed and humiliated, he takes his "God-damn little stripes home in the absolute bottom of [his] pocket . . . and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them."

Suffering makes Brautigan people gentle and cold; humiliation turns them harder than trout steel and meek as fish. The little corporal is so hurt he nullifies himself, becomes a shadow of a person who may never again try to win anything. For Brautigan people fade away from competitive strife, from those psychic battles, those wars for power and position that churn out losers ever more cruelly. And withdrawal and protection are their only answers to America's bad report cards and worse vibrations. Revenge of the Lawn is full of people taking shelter: a newsboy runs his paper route in an armored car, a child crawls into a hollow rock and pretends to live there.

Going underwater, underground, inside, Brautigan people live with no passionate attachment to anyone or any place and never permit themselves to feel a thing. But in Brautigan's scheme withdrawal can be a strategic maneuver. For what a coup if "Corporal" is, as it seems, autobiography; if that kid is Brautigan who grew up to write A Confederate General from Big Sur, in which a spaced-out general of the woods lives among friends too fragile and too removed from their own feelings to ever say the words that hurt so much.

Brautigan's rebels always revolt by creating an insulated world of their own. And in In Watermelon Sugar, that utopian novel, they come together in a magical place to say wild gentle thing like this: "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." Brautigan's dream world is constituted from watermelon sugar and trout steel, from that mixture of sweetness and detachment that permits you to be kind but never loving, disappointed but never enraged, never torn by the world inside and forever protected from the ravages of all the Pittsburghs built out of heat, sweat and fire.

Brautigan always writes of deadpan children, of the little corporals, of the luckless fishermen at life. But they can alchemize themselves into trout people and live with steely passions and diluted hopes. Brautigan makes cutting out your heart the only way to endure. Revenge of the Lawn is not Brautigan's best book. But it has the Brautigan magic—the verbal wildness, the emptiness, the passive force of people who have gone beyond winning or losing to an absolute poetry of survival.

Galloway,1976

"Richard Brautigan, 'The World War I Los Angeles Airplane'"
David Galloway
Die amerikanische Short Story der Gegenwart: Interpretationen. Edited by Peter Freese. Berlin: Schmidt, 1976, pp. 333-339.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Despite the strongly autobiographical tone of his poems, short stories, and novels, Richard Brautigan remains an elusive figure. While photographs of the author appear on the covers of most of his books, he is publicity-shy and makes available to readers only the barest facts about his life. He was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935, and lived in Montana and Oregon as well as the state of Washington during his childhood. The Pacific Northwest is a recurrent setting for his work; indeed, the rugged landscape of that countryside and such local activities as trout-fishing and deer-hunting are often the subjects of his fiction. He remembers World War II with great vividness, but as experienced by Richard Brautigan the child—that is, he remembers it as a kind of elaborate children's game, only slightly more serious than cowboys-and-Indians.

Born near the close of the Great Depression, Brautigan was brought up in relative poverty, never went to university, and yet very early seems to have directed his energies to writing. He moved to San Francisco in 1958 and quickly became known to such local writers as Laurence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, and Michael McClure, beginning to establish for himself a modest reputation as a poet. Brautigan's arrival in San Francisco coincided with the year when the so-called Beat Generation of writers first came to national attention. Young, distrustful of the establishment, often calculatedly anti-intellectual, such writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso offered a refreshing alternative to the conformity of the Eisenhower decade. Brautigan's unconventional writings were inevitably linked with those of the Beat Generation, though they often contrasted dramatically in both subject and tone. Brautigan's working techniques certainly have something in common with Kerouac's jazz-like process of "Spontaneous Prose," yet while Kerouac built his effects through the massive accumulation of detail, Brautigan's best work is characterized by a systematic paring away that leaves the reader with only the barest essentials, as in the haiku-like little poem, "Critical Can Opener":

"There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
find it?"

As the passing years revealed, Brautigan would seem to have more in common with the "Love Generation" of the 1960's than the "Beat Generation" of the 1950's; the former at least, paid tribute in making him a cult figure of almost guru-like proportions, together with Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse, Ken Kesey, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The tendency to link Brautigan to schools and movements has, however, caused frequent misreadings of his work. He certainly shared some of the rowdy irreverence for form and convention popularly associated with the Beat Generation, and his work often brims with a sweet and gentle melancholy reminiscent of the early Flower Children. But Brautigan has always been an individualist, a loner, and it is important to see him on his own terms to do justice to the small, uneven, but ultimately rich corpus of his writings.

While Brautigan first began to establish his reputation as a poet, often gave poetry readings at universities, and for a time was poet-in-residence at Cal Tech University, it was a curious novel titled Trout Fishing in America which first brought him wide recognition, and he is clearly better known today as a novelist than as a writer of poems or short stories. Completed in 1967, Trout Fishing in America consists of forty seven brief chapters relating to an actual incident of fishing for trout in America, or to a ubiquitous and somewhat mystical character named "Trout Fishing in America," or to a place of the same name (symbolic, perhaps, of unspoiled nature), or to a state of mind synonymous with freedom. There is a quality of randomness in the novel's construction, and yet one suspects the randomness is itself ironic—a kind of pastiche of contemporary America, as well as a latter-day example of what Laurence Sterne meant when he described Tristram Shandy as "a history book of what passes in a man's mind." What trout-fishing offers Brautigan's narrator is what it offered Hemingway's Nick Adams—a kind of touchstone by which he could judge the technological clutter surrounding him. It is hardly a cause for wonder that young Americans troubled by the war in Viet Nam, by corruption in politics, by urban violence, racial strife and environmental disaster should have responded with such ardor to Brautigan's vision. The popularity of Trout Fishing in America is closely parallel to the phenomenon of Woodstock, the best seller status of The Whole Earth Catalogue and Charles Reich's The Greening of America. Brautigan's work is thus a rich index of a period of vast and often turbulent social change in the United States, and of interest, therefore, to both literary critic and social historian.

Nonetheless, to see Brautigan's writing only in terms of such topical reference would be greatly to undervalue his talent—as, indeed, most critics have done. Younger Brautigan enthusiasts have tended to praise him in tones of breathless reverence, and more established critics to dismiss him as a fad noteworthy, at best, for his whimsy. Despite the seeming sprawl of a work like Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan is essentially a miniaturist—seizing small and often isolated moments of experience which illuminate for him some central truth of humanity or inhumanity. This is as true of his episodic novels as of his short stories, which often read like vignettes. But because the scale is small, the tone sometimes whimsical, the language often mundane, some readers would seem to miss Brautigan's real subjects: loneliness, death, the hunger for communication, the nature of love, the totem-like qualities which "things" can assume, the hunger for myths. In the light which flashes through the isolated "moments" from which Brautigan's work is composed one has a perfect example of that improbable process of revelation which James Joyce designated an "epiphany."

Since some of the best moments in Brautigan's novels are brief episodes which might be excerpted—and which often appeared separately in periodicals before taking their place in the novels—one might logically expect Brautigan to engage himself more often with the short story. However, Revenge of the Lawn, a volume of less than 200 pages, represents a full decade of production in this form. It is perhaps questionable whether they should be termed short stories at all, for few of them have the development of character and scene which we traditionally await from the short story. Other terms spring to mind: vignette, anecdote, tale, parable, impression, sketch. "The Scarlatti Tilt" is only three sentences long; "Lint" is only four; and only one of the pieces could be termed "long." Clearly, no conventional notion of short story will accommodate such brief productions; indeed, some would seem closer to the concept of prose poem than to the short story. I prefer to think of these pieces as "short stories," however, because each is in a sense a distillation of a short story; their details stay hauntingly in the mind like a kind of spiritual shorthand waiting to be translated by the reader into "full" stories. They ask for collaboration between writer and reader—that is to say, for communication, and it is no accident that many of them are abommuniut the failure of cocation. A young man is attracted to a beautiful girl, but fails to summon the few words that would join her life to his for a time. A woman leaves her lover an angry note, but in the form of a riddle he cannot understand. A lonely narrator visits his former girlfriends to beg cups of coffee—wanting not the coffee but the conversation which should ritually accompany it, and doesn't. Brautigan knocks on the reader's door, and hopes that conversation will follow. Not all of the stories in Revenge of the Lawn are equally successful; some are too cryptic, others overly explicit, but the best embody the essence of a human moment distilled, sanctified, illuminated.

Brautigan's settings and themes are various, but some recur often enough to lend the book as a whole a sense of pattern. Most of the stories involve a first-person narrator very like Brautigan himself; the young man is frequently lonely, and he seeks comfort in women, deer-hunting, male companionship, or trout-fishing. He is, in short, a latter-day Hemingway man, but without the romantic excess of a Nick Adams. The Second World War flits through the narrator's memory as World War I flits through that of Nick Adams—but not as a wounding, rather as a time when life seemed to the boy coherent and meaningful. The trivia of a consumer society are here, as well, and the totems of patriotism, the folk-ways of bootlegging, the omnipresence of death.

The first and title story of Revenge of the Lawn introduces a character—the narrator's insane grandfather—who had precisely prophesied the date when World War I would begin. The concluding story, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane," concerns the death of the narrator's father-in-law, who had been a fighter pilot in World War I. In the lives of Brautigan's own parents and grandparents, that war had been an occasion to "make the world safe for democracy": it had offered a moment of heroic promise by which the remainder of their lives could be measured. For Brautigan himself, only a child during the Second World War, there was no such chance: war was an occasion for collecting scrap paper and downing enemy fighters in the mind's eye only. The contrast between the two wars is important, but more important is that both are seen from within a circle of domestic reference; they are distant, detached, historical, "strange", and matters of fact but not of reality.

Brautigan first published "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" in 1971; in terms of composition, it was thus the most recent of the stories collected in Revenge of the Lawn (RL). It does not appear in final place in the collection for this reason, however, as other stories are arranged with complete disregard for the chronology of their composition. We can thus presume that Brautigan placed it as the concluding piece for more than casual reasons. As a signature to the entire volume it poses the grim question "What does an old man's death mean?" This in turn raises the question of what the old man's life had meant, and what role the war had played in it. The story balances the momentous and the banal, and it turns round a few lines of conversation between a man and his wife.

"The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" takes the form of a reminiscence, as the narrator looks back from the vantage point of 1969 (when anti-war sentiment in America was at its highest pitch) to a summer day in 1960 when a telephone call from Los Angeles brought the news of his father-in-law's death. This bare outline of the narrative circumstances, however, we learn only as we move into the story. The first and preeminent fact is stated with almost chilling simplicity: "He was found lying dead near the television set on the front room floor of a small rented house in Los Angeles." (RL, 170) We have no idea who "He" is, or even "where" the story is taking place from the narrator's point of view. The second sentence ("My wife had gone to the store . . .") (RL, 170) might suggest that the action occurs in a single city; only later do we realize that Los Angeles itself is at some distance from the home where a troubled husband awaits his wife's return. And yet for all its lack of conventional short story information, the opening sentence is richly explicit. A man has died, unceremoniously, unheroically, and alone, before the television set which—as we later learn—had become the center of his existence. A man once followed by a rainbow has come to the end of his life in a "small rented house." If war makes heroes, both life and death unmake them.

Just as there is stark contrast between the death of a hero and his banal surroundings. so too is there contrast between the news of his death and the mood of those who receive it: "We were in an ice-cream mood." (RL, 170) Like Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, the narrator rejects emotional rhetoric to state the fact simply: "'Your father died this afternoon.'" (RL, 170) But there is an almost bridgeable gap between the statement of the fact and a realization of its meaning. A decade later, the narrator is still "thinking about what death means to us all." (RL, 171) He therefore determines to compile a list of facts, of explicit statements, which will summarize his father-in-law's life; the technique of the list or catalogue, occasionally reminiscent of Whitman, is one which Brautigan frequently uses in his novels. In its muted understatement, the list also becomes a kind of elegy. In capsule form, the dead man's life reads, through point 9, like a conventional re-telling of the celebrated American Dream. A poor farm boy of German ancestry leaves home to become a schoolteacher, then a pioneer car salesman, a fighter pilot, a prosperous bank director. And yet there are already shadows on the dream: a rift with his grandfather, an unhappy marriage, a horrible automobile accident, the flak "clouds" of German anti-aircraft guns. From point 9 onwards, the summary seems an inversion of the American Dream of rags-to-riches: the stockmarket crash, failure in business, a series of demeaningly petty jobs, alcoholism, "televisionism." It is significant that the old man watches "afternoon television"—conventionally, in the United States, mindless quiz programs and soap operas designed for bored housewives: hardly the fare for a man who once sailed the skies in company with a rainbow.

There are, in all, thirty-three "facts" about the old man's life, as there were thirty-three years in the life of Christ, and Brautigan would seem to imply the spiritual transcendence of even the most conventional existence, much as J.D. Salinger does in "Zooey," where the hero argues with his tormented sister that even the inconsequential "Fat Lady" is really Christ himself. The paradox of Brautigan's vision is that the spiritual significance of a life and a death cannot be summarized, like the weekly wash, in a list of "facts," and yet only the facts remain. Interestingly, Brautigan repeats one fact—the flight over France, the anti-aircraft gun, the rainbow—twice, which in turn draws the reader's attention back to the title of the story. Brautigan's titles often have a punning quality, and sometimes apply to the stories only as riddles which the reader must solve. In this case, the problem is with the designation "Los Angeles." The airplane which the old man once flew was no "Los Angeles airplane;" nor, at that time in his life, did the young soldier think of Los Angeles as his home. If the actual plane is meant to symbolize the young man's lust for adventure, his daring, and—in the form of the rainbow—his hopes for his life, then the Los Angeles airplane is what his life has become. It is his wine bottle, or the television set on which he sees war films. Or perhaps the Los Angeles airplane is the old man himself—superceded by technology, "grounded" because too old to fly: "'It's time for you to go out to pasture.'" (RL, 174) his employer says. And so, a man who once dreamed dreams, who showed legendary kindness to the employees who tended his own pasture, and devotion to his wives, is "found lying dead near the television set on the front room floor of a small rented house in Los Angeles." (RL, 170)

There is profoundly moving sentiment in Brautigan's story, with scarcely a trace of sentimentality. As his narrator observes, "Always at the end of the words somebody is dead." (RL, 170) Yet with all its sober understatement, its numbered catalogue, its reluctance to play on the reader's emotions, the story succeeds remarkably well in realizing its intention: to explain "what his death meant to all of us." (RL, 171) Brautigan's story endows the death with meaning by shaping it into the work of art—a work which argues, like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, that the undistinguished character who has died, while perhaps "not the finest character that ever lived," is nonetheless "a human being . . . So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person." While Miller calls attention to the death of Everyman through lyric reiteration and dramatic stress, Brautigan achieves his effect through the sparest economies—and, ultimately, through a respectful silence.

In its rigid economies, "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" is representative of the control and discipline of Brautigan's best stories. The other side of his talent—an ironically poker-faced humor that he inherits from Mark Twain—is absent here save for such grace notes as "an early-in-the-night-just-a-few-blocks-away store" (RL, 170) and the doomed herds of sheep. Yet the story makes it abundantly clear that Brautigan is more than a faddish writer brought to popularity by a horde of flower-sniffing young Americans. Exploring the perennial American themes of loneliness, innocence, and the ritual of the woodsman from his own distinctive point of view, his work is a comment on the continuing search for American identity. That the search should often confront him with the spectre of death is not surprising, for as Ernest Hemingway once remarked, ". . . all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true storyteller who would keep that from you."

Hicks,1981

"Sweet Wine in Place of Life: The Revenge of the Lawn"
Jack Hicks
In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. University of North Carolina Press, 1981, pp. 12, 140, 151-161.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Richard Brautigan's literary fortunes have been directly connected to the discovery of underground youth culture by private business and later by the American public. One of the few figures to make the transition from the West Coast "beat" culture of the late 1950s to the "hip" of the 1960s, Brautigan was a familiar figure in San Francisco in the late 1950s. His earliest work was poetry, privately printed by small presses in volumes like Please Plant This Book (no date, poems printed in packages of flower seeds)—given away to friends and acquaintances or proffered for whatever gifts or donations might be offered.

Thereafter, Brautigan's work appeared in a series of small poetry and prose works published by Donald Allen under the Four Seasons Foundation imprint. In 1969, Brautigan's underground reputation was made official as Delacorte Press acquired national rights to Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. The three works were bound in a single facsimile edition, and Brautigan quickly joined Kurt Vonnegut, Herman Hesse, and Rod McKuen as a popular cult literary figure. Since that time, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1970), Revenge of the Lawn (1971), and five poetry books (most recently, June 30th, June 30th) have sold very strongly.

It has become a popular critical pastime to dismiss Richard Brautigan's writing as merely faddish, a more hip, barely weightier version of Rod McKuen's maunderings. Brautigan's poetry does little to discourage this sort of overreaction. It seems uniformly slight; arch, almost unbearably naive, it is consciously unself-conscious (picture a moronic adolescent friend waving hello from a televised bowling show).

As in the case of Leonard Cohen's poetry, the figure behind the poems is taken with the notion that his every single gesture is an act of art. Consider Brautigan's "Albion Breakfast":

"Last night (here) a long pretty girl
asked me to write a poem about Albion,
so she could put it in a black folder
that has albion printed nicely
in white on the cover.

"I said yes. She's at the store now
getting something for breakfast.
I'll surprise her with this poem
when she gets back."

The problem is that there are two Richard Brautigans. One is commercial property and a created cultural hero; the other, a unique writer of narrow but very distinctive talents. In his worst moments, Brautigan the spokesman is offered to us as a creature of the new consciousness, Mr. Gentleness and Soft Drugs himself, the antigeneral commanding the Green Brigade, a guy nonfighting the un-war against mean Mr. Alcohol Suburbia—as in In Watermelon Sugar, where the villainous inBOIL (inwardly burning perhaps?) and his gang of "trash" threaten the pastoral allegory of the sugar works: "InBOIL came out to greet us. His clothes were all wrinkled and dirty and so was he. He looked like a mess and he was drunk . . . A couple of other guys came out of the shacks and stared at us. They all looked like inBOIL. They had made the same mess out of themselves by being evil and drinking that whiskey made from forgotten things. One of them, a yellow-haired one, sat down on a pile of disgusting objects and just stared at us like he was an animal." (IWS, 70) This is the Brautigan who lounges on the covers of his records and books (with successively prettier girls accompanying him), who peers from book advertisements and reviews in underground newspapers and popular magazines: commercial, promoted, annoying. The conversion of whatever extant counter-culture there has been to a series of products and images has long been a reality in the world of the youth culture market. Like Kurt Vonnegut and Leonard Cohen, the first Brautigan has been a prime commodity on the "revolution and evolution" market. Mercifully, a second, rather talented Brautigan lingers behind that carefully hustled facade. This second Brautigan, the writer, concerns me here.

Brautigan, Cohen, Vonnegut: the appeal of their works stems from the fact that each offers an imaginative recreation of a hostile world. And like Kurt Vonnegut in particular, Brautigan's appeal results from the sensibility he creates and sustains in his writing. "So it goes" of Slaughterhouse Five contains a lingering tone, a distinct way of reporting the world, a personal, original voice that suggests to us that, in the face of unspeakable horrors like Dresden and Vietnam, one must resign oneself to laughter and fantasy: one must touch, however briefly, another troubled human being. Similarly, another Richard Brautigan appears in The Revenge of the Lawn, where the style is less whimsical and the voice less infantile; he is a writer of more controlled prose in these pages and often approaches the surreal, constantly attended by a sense of the primacy of loss and death.

From the start, Richard Brautigan's characters have been children, recluses, various orders of naïfs, or mildly demented innocents—how they can, and indeed must, imaginatively reconceive the world. In Trout Fishing in America his "Kool-Aid wino" mimics a peculiar adult game, creating "his own Kool-Aid reality and . . . illuminat[ing] himself by it": "When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as a result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn't because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn't even enough money to buy him a truss. So be stayed home in bed and became a Kool-Aid wino." (TFA, 8)

This sort of imaginative play—an awareness of the necessity and force of mental leaping that can transform a base external world—suffuses Brautigan's fiction. "Attrition" is the first word of his first prose book, A Confederate General from Big Sur; although attrition, the gradual death of the substantial world, is inevitable, it must constantly be resisted. Loss, death, and the destruction of dreams wait at every corner but can be held off by the imagination. An exemplary tale from Trout Fishing in America makes the point:

"One spring afternoon as a child in the strange town of Portland, I walked down to a different street corner, and saw a row of old houses, huddled together like seals on a rock. Then there was a long field that came sloping down off a hill. The field was covered with green grass and bushes. On top of the hill there was a grove of tall, dark trees. At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray . . . The next day I would go trout fishing for the first time. I would get up early and eat my breakfast and go.

"The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillean hook.

"I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill.

"But as I got closer to the creek I could see that something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it.

"There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.

"The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.

"I stood there a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.

"Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood.

I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself." (TFA, 5)

Attrition is a constant menace to Brautigan's various imagined worlds, and it moves gradually to the center stage of his works. By In Watermelon Sugar, for example, it is a major concern, but even here Brautigan proceeds indirectly through strained allegory, as the forces of death are aligned with inBOIL's whiskey-guzzling bandit gang. They constitute a first of physical violence, impinging on the misted dreamy world of iDEATH:

"In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.

> "Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to travel, and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.

"I live in a shack near iDEATH. I can see iDEATH out the window. It is beautiful. I can also see it with my eyes closed and touch it. Right now it is cold and turns like something in the hand of a child. I do not know what that thing could be.

"There is a delicate balance in iDEATH. It suits us.

"The shack is small but pleasing and comfortable as my life and made from pine, watermelon sugar and stones as just about everything here is.

"Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then traveled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.

"I have a bed, a chair, a table and a large chest that I keep my things in. I have a lantern that burns watermelontrout oil at night.

"That is something else. I'll tell you about it later. I have a gentle life." (IWS, 1)

With The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, Brautigan seems at once more relaxed and more controlled. The allegorical stiffness that flaws In Watermelon Sugar is gone, and Brautigan seems more willing to give his talent the rein it needs. His strengths are in no sense analytical or political, and the allegory of old versus new culture pervading In Watermelon Sugar has a forced, puppet-show quality. He also shifts to a more serious tone when death, wasting away, and the impermanence of the physical world occupy his attention. This is a sparer book than his others, more metaphorical and more controlled. The poetic quality of his prose tends to be less indulgent and less filled with strained naiveté; he evokes the surreal with a new authority. Consider the "talisman" the narrator notices on the wing of a plane taking Vida and him to Mexico for her abortion: "I looked down on my wing and saw what looked like a coffee stain as if somebody had put a cup of coffee down on the wing. You could see the ring stain of the cup and then a big splashy sound stain to show that the cup had fallen over . . . I looked down beyond my coffee stain to see that we were flying now above a half-desolate valley that showed the agricultural designs of man in yellow and in green. But the mountains had no trees in them and were barren and sloped like ancient surgical instruments." (TA, 136-139)

In his most recent book of stories, Revenge of the Lawn, the second Brautigan emerges more clearly than ever. The book contains sixty-two freshly conceived fictions, in which the main theme is how imagination, especially in children, can directly reconceive and recreate the world. Innocence runs like a stream through this book and is almost always deflected off some modern discomfort or horror. The horrors take many forms. They may appear as the tedium and ennui in the life of Mr. Henly, "a simple American man" who "works in an insurance office keeping the dead separated from the living. They were in filing cabinets. Everybody at the office said that he had a great future" ("The Wild Birds of Heaven." RL, 51) They may emerge as pure senselessness, as in "A Short History of Oregon," which closes on an unexplained gothic country scene and the cryptic notation. "I had no reason to believe that there was anything more to life than this." (RL, 107) But whatever forms appear, a note of death and loss pervades. Brautigan's humor is, as always, abundant, but the tone here is bittersweet and elegiac—yearning for the ghosts and pasts of Tacoma and Portland childhoods—or nostalgic—evoking memories of dead friends, lost lovers, tainted innocence. Death: old people are rightly terrified of it, as when the young narrator causes discomfort in "The Old Bus":

"I felt terrible to remind them of their lost youth, their passage through slender years in such a cruel and unusual manner. Why were we tossed this way together as if we were nothing but a weird salad served on the seats of a God-damn bus?

"I got off the bus at the next possibility. Everybody was glad to see me go and none of them were more glad than I.

"I stood there and watched after the bus, its strange cargo now secure, growing distant in the journey of time until the bus was gone from sight. (RL, 72)"

Death: children bumble happily by it; some creatures, like the dog in "The Rug." would welcome it, should it present itself: "He was so senile that death had become a way of life and he was lost from the act of dying." (RL, 58) The skull grins more and more, even through the beautiful faces of ladies that grace the covers of his books. Strangely, Brautigan's fiction has increasingly yielded the taste of more tragic cases: Ambrose Bierce and Ernest Hemingway. This is particularly true if one sees in his style, with its lucid, intentionally simplified landscapes dotted by occasional metaphors, a strategy for filtering insanity and chaos out of the world.

Like many recent writers, Brautigan has moved increasingly toward truncated, highly impressionistic forms. Donald Barthelme expresses amazement that anyone can sustain fiction for longer than twenty-five pages. The reputation of an acknowledged prose master, Jorge Luis Borges, rests on three books of short ficciones. Like that of his more prestigious fellows, Brautigan's best work denies a fixed form or genre, as if closed forms (short story, novel, sustained discourse) were rigid cultural projections of totalitarian minds. His work has increasingly abandoned the few pivots of realistic fiction evident in, say, A Conferate General from Big Sur. John Clayton's appraisal strikes me as accurate:

"Part of the magic is in the discontinuity itself. If Trout Fishing in America is in part a life-style of freedom and rambling, these qualities are present not only in the metaphorical transformations and illogical connections but in the apparent looseness, casualness, easy rambling of the narrator's talk. Brautigan has no interest in character in introspection or psychological insight, in interpersonal dynamics; no interest in materiality; no interest in time or causality. The book runs profoundly counter to the bourgeois instincts of the novel. It runs counter to the bourgeois world view of practicality, functionality, rationality."

It becomes apparent that the attraction of a Brautigan or a Vonnegut results from the overall tone of the work, from an entire attitude toward the eccentric worlds laid out in their fictions. More than anything else, what unifies Richard Brautigan's work and gives it appeal is his sensibility. With Revenge of the Lawn, his sensibility suggests that life is brief and bittersweet, happiness is ephemeral, and fiction, therefore, should bear witness to this condition. Furthermore, fiction should go beyond incorporating this condition; it should strive to resist it and attempt to arrest entropy and the forces of attrition. Thus his fictions become brief capsules in which one, two, or three instants of perception, mental metaphorical leaps, can permit beauty to hold the forces of death temporarily at bay. One of his briefer fictions, "Lint." contents itself simply with offering metaphor as a means of transforming lost bits of innocence:

"I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint." (RL, 121)

It is exactly this tone and sensibility that make Brautigan a unique writer and one of special attractions for younger readers. His particular contribution to the incipient counterculture is to offer instances of evasion, examples of how a harsh world can be held at a distance or transformed. Unlike Marge Piercy, he shows increasingly less interest in politics as a mode of transformation. Indeed, John Clayton's phrase, "the politics of imagination," is apt. Gurney Norman's comment on the "stoned" quality of his perception seems similarly accurate: "I think your phrase 'yield to it' is important, because Brautigan is not a hard-sell kind of writer. It's not his style to overload the senses. He very softly invites you into his fictional world. But once inside, indeed, your heart may well be broken, because within these apparently delicate pieces are people up against the ultimate issues of love, loneliness, and death."

As already suggested, Revenge of the Lawn does demonstrate the wry, antic humor that flavors Brautigan's early prose. But these fictions turn less to humor as a means of masking pain than as an alternative to ugliness; they have much to do with nostalgia, memory, and loss. Such humor is particularly true of the three most effective pieces in the collection: "Revenge of the Lawn," "Blackberry Motorist," and "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane."

The title story, the first of the collection, is also the most humorous. "Revenge of the Lawn" is an amusing remembrance of the narrator's grandmother and her second husband Jack. The actions resemble slapstick as Jack is haunted and later revenged by the front lawn and its conspiratorial fellows. However, the comedy draws up short at the close of the fiction, as Brautigan leaves us with a stark, suggestive scene:

"The first time I remember anything in life occurred in my grandmother's front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937. I remember a man, probably Jack, cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene.

"It looked strange, even for a first memory of life, to watch a man pour gallons and gallons of kerosene all over a tree lying stretched out thirty feet or so on the ground, and then to set fire to it while the fruit was still green on the branches." (RL, 141)

"Blackberry Motorist" seems thoroughly innocent, refreshing, a simple account of adolescent berry-picking. On second glance, it also bears a richly evocative, almost Biercian image of darkness and waste at the center of things. Climbing under a bridge, the narrator spies the hulk of an old Model A sedan tangled deep in the vines:

"Sometimes when I got bored with picking blackberries I used to look in the deep shadowy dungeon-like places way down in the vines. You could see things that you couldn't make out down there and shapes that seemed to change like phantoms... It took me about two hours to tunnel my way with ripped clothes and many bleeding scratches into the front seat of that car with my hands on the steering wheel, a foot on the gas pedal, a foot on the brake, surrounded by the smell of castle-like upholstery and staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into the sunny green shadows." (RL, 82)

"The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" is the final piece in Revenge of the Lawn. It is also a recollection: the narrator tells a lover that her father has died. "I tried to think of the best way to tell her," the narrator relates, "with the least amount of pain, but you cannot camouflage death with words. Always at the end of the words somebody is dead." (RL, 170) He offers a fictional cenotaph, thirty-three numbered statements about the father: "He has been dead for almost ten years," he tells us, "and I've done a lot of thinking about what his death meant to us." (RL, 171) The statements provide a skeletal summary of loss, disappointment, and disillusionment in the forms of overbearing immigrant parents, ruined marriages, automobile accidents, repeated job failures (banks, sheep ranches, bookkeeping, custodial work). But in spite of his long decline in fortune, the father remains a decent man, and his last five years are paid out decorously:

"28. He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn't afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o'clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.

"29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day. He always kept his wine bottles hidden in a kitchen cabinet and would drink secretly from them, though he was alone.

"He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk." (RL, 174)

Like one of Brautigan's earliest characters, the Kool-Aid wino in Trout Fishing in America, the father chooses to gently ignore an unpleasant existence. Although the ruptured boy has his watery, unsweetened Kool-Aid, he has mainly the dreams it releases for him. This is certainly true of the father in his own way, for Brautigan tells us: "30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use." (RL, 174) Kool Aid and sweet wine, each is a way into dreaming, a way of reconceiving human existence. Brautigan's dreams take shape in words, but he knows finally through the boy and through the father, and we know too, that "always at the end of the words somebody is dead." (RL, 170)

Klinkowitz,1982

"In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski"
Jerome Klinkowitz
Studies in American Fiction, vol. 10, no. 1, 1982, pp. 118-119.
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Jack Hicks is that style of critic who sees social movements as structuring literary art. Fiction, Hicks believes, is a response to the times, and therefore the disruptive pressures of the American 1960s and 1970s have created a uniquely innovative literature. Both social and artistic traditions were unsettled during these decades, and so Hicks now sees four different literatures as having resulted:

"American fiction has franctionated into its primary ingredients, and further . . . four distinct elements can be crystalized: metafiction, the fiction of postmodern consciousness, as seen in Donald Barthelme's work; recent Afro-American prose, our most resonant folk stories in human memory, as represented in Ernest Gaine's writing; the dreaming tales of Richard Brautigan, Marge Piercy, and Ken Kesey, countercultural fables that envision alternatives to mainstream American life; and finally, the contemporary meditations on public power and private terrors, as witnessed in Jerzy Kosinki's keloid romances (269)."

Aesthetic innovators, makers of a new Black tradition, the sensibility of the counterculture (including the women's movement), and the modern romance of terror and control: these were indeed the highpoints of the Sixties and Seventies, and Hicks has done well to show how each helped create a new fiction. Since Ihab Hassen's Radical Innocence (1961), readers have been waiting for a perceptive critic to synthesize the fiction of our age, and Jack Hicks comes as close as anyone to doing that in In the Singer's Temple.

Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski are indeed important figures. But in this age whose characteristics it has been to shun major figues and disregard the masterpiece, there are dozens of other noteworthy writers as well, and it is Hicks' genius to have virtually covered them all as he sets the stage for his longer individual analyses. Hence, to explain Barthelme, Hicks tells us about the fiction of Gass, Sukenick, and Coover; Ismael Reed, Clarence Major, and Imamu Baraka figure in the placing of Ernest Gaines; Vonnegut is, of course, the Dutch uncle of Brautigan, just as Kerouac prefigures Kesey; and Jerzy Kosinski's fictions can hardly be discussed without an awareness of Mailer and Burroughs. One gets a good composite picture of contemporary American fiction from this broadly synthetic book.

"Metafictionists tend to regard everything about them as man-created, as fiction" (22), hence the peculiar world-vision of Donald Barthelme, whose characters are trapped in language as often as they, or their narrator, use it. There is, however, a way out (Barthelme is an American, after all): "To live freely, as a work of art or as a man, one must create himself constantly" (p. 36), and Barthelme's later fictions do this eminently well. Black writers are themselves victims of a constricting systematic vision, and so Ernest Gaines is celebrated for his refashioning of history (through mythic and folk materials) to put his protagonists (and himself) back in control. Counterculture writers of the period are notoriously, even deliberately short on practical vision; their revolution is not the same as the Black writers'. Instead, they are intent on creating a sensibility; this, and not a practical program, creates their own appeal and screens out what they themselves find distasteful. As for the terror of modern life, Jerzy Kosinski makes it palatable by conducting his novels in the form of "philosophical examinations" (195). His protagonists are created by the posing of oppositions; of all the writers studied, he is the most didactic yet the most compelling to read.

Hicks mentions that part of his book was drafted during a Fulbright to Paris. The book is amazingly free of French theory, to its credit; but on one point Barthe, Derrida, and Kristeva could have helped. Hicks believes it to the fictionists' discredit that they are unable to deal realistically with social materials, displaying "a broad lack of belief in the imagination's ability or need to transmute social reality to any higher form" (8). "Young American writers of the 1960s and 1970s were absorbed in their own personal and subcultural experiences," Hicks explains (13), which is only partly correct. French theorists have described recent culture's distrust of the monological novel, that authoritative document which presumes to teach readers what reality is. The Death of the Book and Birth of Writing is how the French describe our era, a thesis wonderfully complimentary to Jack Hick's own fine thoughts in this helpful and reliable book.

Dietrich,1983

"Brautigan's 'Homage to the San Francisco YMCA': A Modern Fairy Tale"
Ronald F. Dietrich
Notes On Contemporary Literature, vol. 13, no. 4, Sep. 1983, pp. 2-4
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Brautigan's "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA" is probably best categorized as a fairy tale, containing as it does magical transformations, bewitchment, and a "once upon a time" beginning. But of course it's not the usual fairy tale. For one thing, most fairy tales aren't written for academics. Not that one necessarily needs to be an academic to enjoy this tale, but it helps to know who Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky are, not to mention Shakespeare, Donne, and Dickinson.

It also helps to know that Wordsworth declared poetry to be the result of "a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and that from Aristotle on the cathartic theory of literature has been popular with critics. For obviously the hare-brained protagonist of this story has heard something of that sort. He's heard not only that poetry serves as the conveyer of flowing emotions, but that it serves the reader as a purger of bad feelings. Why else would it occur to him to replace his plumbing with poetry? Perhaps the idea occurred to him after he'd had an emotionally "draining" experience with poetry. If poetry can drain his spirit of its poisons, why not drain his body as well?

This confusion of levels of reality is not surprising in one who profits in insanity. Our protagonist lives off a pension "that was the result of a 1920's investment that his grandfather had made in a private insane asylum that was operating quite profitably in Southern California." From the Jazz Age of the 20's, so illusorily successful, craziness has so flourished in America that instead of jumping out of windows in the crash of '29 stockbrokers would have done better to invest in it. For the whole country, Brautigan implies, has become so confused about what's real that it has not only lost the ability to distinguish reality from illusion, but it trades on their confusion. The insane asylum, for example, "was one of those places that do not look like an insane asylum." Located so close to Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Disneyland, where illusion triumphs over reality daily, how could it he otherwise?

Unused to reality, ensconced in the never-never land of Pacific Heights, Brautigan's princely patron of poetry naturally misunderstands the uses of poetry. Nothing is more practical than poetry if spiritual cleansing is what you're after, but if as an American you insist that true practicality consists in administering to one's material needs, then you may push poetry too far. In that material realm, as Auden put it, "poetry makes nothing happen." But the protagonist apparently hasn't read Auden, for he forces poetry to undertake a physical task it was never designed for—cleansing of the body. It is no exaggeration to say that "Christopher Columbus' slight venture sailing West was merely the shadow of a dismal event in the comparison."

Unfortunately, the magical transformations—of the minor poets into a toilet, for example—don't work. Our would-be fairy tale sorcerer is a failure, but typically he blames if on the poetry. "'Face up to reality,' the man said to the poetry." But Brautigan means us to notice that it's the would-be sorcerer who's bewitched and who can't face up to reality. Note that "he of course had never met a poet in person. That would have been a little too much." Having a Hollywood mercantile notion of what's useful, the protagonist is unable to deal with poetry's exclusively spiritual usefulness and its insistent spiritual reality, especially in the face of the fact that real human beings are capable of it. That is, physical beings who just like himself need toilets but who are capable of creating the spiritual contradiction that is poetry would be hard to understand for this one-track mind. Man's dual nature is beyond the comprehension of the materialistic monomania.

But perhaps poetry is a little too insistent in its reality. Once you give poetry the notion that it can serve as literal plumbing, it's hard to convince it otherwise. One of the worst features of the materialist's idea of practicality is that it corrupts even that which is opposed to its values. Installed as literal plumbing, the poetry begins to take itself too literally as a drainer of physical poisons, presuming to be real in a sense it can never be. Yeats, for example, believed so hard in becoming the golden bird of Byzantium that he sometimes lost track of the physical reality he was trying to escape from, the art reality completely replacing for him material reality. In its insistent reality, poetry is always a little presumptuous in this way. Presumptuous or not, the poetry is right in kicking Brautigan's protagonist down the stairs, for his folly is the opposite of Yeats'. His mad insistence is that poetry cannot be "real" unless it is materially useful; that is, that spiritual values count for nothing unless they can be converted into material values.

Madness is the point here. The protagonist virtually lives in the bathroom of the YMCA, talking to himself "with the light out." Living in ignorance and spiritual darkness, the protagonist devotes his life to an obsessive-compulsive act of cleansing that can never be fulfilled because the toilet, however useful otherwise, is not the proper agent for the purging of what really ails him. His malaise is succinctly explained by his retreat to the YMCA. Christianity in general, but especially Americanized Christianity, is a fine example of a spiritual intention that has learned to accomodate the material world, and the ultimate in that accommodation is the YMCA where physical exercise typically takes precedence over spiritual exercise. Whereas the poetry fails to become literal plumbing, religion has made the transformation successfully, in a sense, and is now more plumbing than not. The protagonist may feel more at home there, but he'll never stop muttering to himself, for toilets do not cleanse minds or hearts.

Brautigan is a kind of Christopher Columbus whose every work leads us to the discovery of America. America has been damned by its writers before for its materialism, but seldom has that indictment been put with such charming and amusing simplicity, and with such daring in paradox. For only a fairy tale, that form of literature most held in contempt by our "realistic", "down-to-earth," "practical and no-nonsense" business civilization, could capture the reality of our cultural schizophrenia, which invokes God while worshipping Mammon. As his protagonist pays knightly homage to that institution most aptly symbolic of the selling out of spiritual intentions, Brautigan ronically portrays this American prince as an individual bewitched by false values and self-entombed upon "the throne" of a materialistic obsession.

Betts,1983

"In the Singer's Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski"
Richard A. Betts
College Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, 1983, pp. 228-229.
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As his title, derived from a Rilke sonnet, is meant to suggest, Jack Hicks believes that the "dismembered body of Orpheus is an emblem for the postmodern American character, the divided waters of contemporary writing, the broken texts and tales and selves of many postwar prose fictions." The questionable assumption, with which Hicks begins, that realism has always been the dominant mode of American fiction does not invalidate his accurate perception that there has been a significant shift on the part of young writers of the last two decades away from the task of recording quotidan American experience toward experiments in black humor, fable, romance, and allegory. Undeniabley, this generation of writers has, as Hicks contends, avoided engaging traditional social and political materials in favor of exploring personal experience and the varieties of human consciousness. Further assuming that these trends are largely due to the virtual dissolution of the American cultural mainstream, Hicks undertakes to "celebrate and clarify" some of the diverse voices of prose fiction that have recently emerged, however fragmented, solipsistic, or fabulative they may be. Obviously, anyone looking for a net coherence in this fiction, or a single, revelatory key to its understanding, will not find it here. But that, it seems, is Hicks' point.

In these self-evidently "divided waters" Hicks discerns four principle elements: metafiction, recent Afro-American fiction of "historical imagination," alternative fables from the counterculture, and anti-humanist romances of public power and private terror, each of which he takes up in turn with unequal results. The several sections begin with a general definition and elaboration of the literary category in its historical context, effectively illustrated by means of a wide-ranging and informative reference to current writing; they culminate in a close examination of the work of one or more representative practitioners. Hicks' excellent introduction to metafiction, "the fiction of postmodern consciousness," and subsequent analysis of the stories and novels of Donald barthelme seem to proceed most logically from his previously established premises. After showing such fiction to be self-referential linguistic constructs, insistent upon their own validity as alternatives to external reality, and eminently aware of ther own artifice, Hicks convincingly demonstrates that Barthelme is truly representative of the metafictional viewpoint and worthy of consideration as a major contemporary voice. In addition, Hicks is particulary helpful in revealing Barthelme's links to French phenomenology and non-literary art forms.

Hicks is equally lucid and well-informed in his discusion of recent Afro-American literature, which he sees as developing a greater historical awareness of black experience, using indigenous black forms and language, and addressing itself more directly to the common interests of the black audience. The analysis of the evolving historical consciousness in the novels of Ernest Gaines is perceptive and well-deserved. Hicks' chapter on the writers associated with the counterculure, however, is much less successful, in part because, as he admits, relevant examples are few and undistinguished. His case here is further undermined by his own reservations about the works of Richard Brautigan and the novel of Marge Piercy which he chooses to examine in detail.

The longest section of the book is devoted to the work of Jerzy Kosinski, who is presented as "a romancer of modern terror." Although one is grateful for the intelligent, thorough analysis of The Painted Bird and the novels which followed, an analysis which should do much to dispel the doubts recently raised as to their authorial authenticity, a question arises about the place of this discussion in Hicks' overall scheme. Unlike the other writers considered, Kosinski is not shown to be representative of a significant element in contemporary American fiction. Of the "anti-humanists" he is grouped with, only Burroughs is mentioned, and no literary context is developed. As a whole, In the Singer's Temple is, finally, something less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are full of insights and should enlarge the understanding of those interested in contemporary American fiction.

Horvath,1984

"Wrapped in a Winter Rug: Richard Brautigan Looks at Common Responses to Death"
Brooke Kenton Horvath
Notes on Modern American Literature, vol. 8, no. 3, Winter 1984, Item 14.
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"Winter Rug," a story included in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970, reveals in brief compass the preoccupation with death central to Richard Brautigan's fiction. Whereas Brautigan's major imaginative efforts present characters who typically bring radical tactics into play in their efforts to gain psychological control over death (the retreat into fantasy in A Confederate General from Big Sur, death's imaginative revision in Trout Fishing in America, the attempt of the iDEATH inhabitants to live in and with death in In Watermelon Sugar, and the mock-heroic triumph over death achieved in The Abortion), "Winter Rug" examines the paltry efforts of two characters to defuse death's sting through recourse to society's less drastic, habitual ploys.

The story concerns an old dog "dying very slowly from senility." Owned by a wealthy old woman, the dog is eventually wrapped in an expensive Chinese rug and buried in the garden following the woman's reluctant decision to have her pet put "to sleep," a euphemistic expression that, like the rug, serves to hide death's reality. "Winter Rug," however, proves interesting not because of its plot but because of the responses the dog's death elicits from the narrator and his friend (the woman's gardener and the source of the story). Indeed, the first page of this stubby tale concerns not the dog and its owner but the narrator, who commences by presenting credentials to establish his competence to speak of death. His funeral vita begins:

"My credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I've had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I've been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I've read The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds and my favorite After Many a Summer Dies the Swan."

The narrator goes on to cite funerals he has witnessed (from a distance) and recalls once seeing a corpse, "done tastefully in a white sheet," carried out of a skid row flophouse to an ambulance solemnly waiting to drive it away, his friend remarking at the time that "Being dead [was] one step up from living in that hotel." The narrator concludes simply, "As you can see, I am an expert on death in California."

The narrator's opening lines thus disclose several common means of masking death's horror. His mourning, like the tasteful winding sheet and stately processional bestowed upon a flophouse resident, witnesses to society's usual practice of blanketing death in distracting legalities and honors (the ambulance "was prohibited by law from having a siren"); of wrapping it in ritualized, symbolic acts that serve to sooth us survivors; of handing it over to professionals to be disguised and distanced: all ways of removing death from the sphere of daily life, ways ably dissected in Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death. Reading this book and the others mentioned suggests a second common attempt at conquering death's strangeness: the acquisition of knowledge, the knowledge-is-power routine.

The narrator also tells of visiting Forest Lawn and romping "like an eager child," as though life's final mystery could be familiarized, made the object of happy expectation, rendered innocuous (ploys Brautigan characters attempt elsewhere, as in The Abortion and In Watermelon Sugar), made part of a game (an attempt made in many of the stories of childhood in Revenge: for instance, "The Ghost Children of Tacoma," "A Need for Gardens," and "Sand Castles"). His childlike behavior suggests further a denial of time's passage, a willed return to innocence, to that time when, necrobiotically speaking, one is as far from death as one will ever be. Finally, the friend's joke, with its allusion to the notion of death as the doorway to one's reward, seeks to deflect a discomfiting confrontation through humor, which serves to distance the fact of death and to deflate its seriousness.

Beginning his account of the dog's death, the narrator observes that "the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death." Dwelling upon the dog's suffering, the narrator resorts implicitly to the perennial wisdom, seeing death as a release from suffering, a kindness: it is the animal's "time"; death is for the best. In short, this "metaphysical war" (as the narrator describes the enterprise of funeral directors) is won by giving death a purpose, by transforming it from end to means (another tactic in the Revenge stories: compare "A Complete History of Germany and Japan").

Finally, the story closes with the friend cursing the dog and having second thoughts about burying a rug worth $1000. Although someone earning a gardener's wages might well regret the lost opportunity of possessing such a treasure, more importantly the friend's comment reveals another prevalent means of controlling death anxieties: by reducing death's place in the scheme of things, by pretending that other things are worthier of one's concern, things whose loss constitutes sounder reason to mourn.

"Winter Rug" presents its thanatopsis with unusual guilelessness, but its catalog of life-enhancing illusions is far from unusual. Although the narrator claims to be "an expert on death," clearly he is no more experienced than most of us, and his attempts at controlling his responses to life's irremediable end are among society's routine strategies, as he must know from his reading. The defensive tone with which he begins—as well as his limiting his area of expertise to "death in California"—exposes self-doubts vis-à-vis that mastery of death's mystery his introduction is supposedly establishing, just as his story reveals one old woman's pathetic attempts first to deny death's reality ("When the old woman [first saw the death doctor's] little black bag, she paled visibly. The unnecessary reality of it scared her . . .") and then to control death by choosing the time and means of her pet's departure.

But the inadequacy of the narrator's ploys and those of his friend are perhaps best suggested by the fact that an unknown dog's death has so captured the narrator's imagination, has thrust the problem of death so unavoidably before him, that he must transform it into a story, into art. Particularly in the absence of religious belief (an absence present in this story), such an act, according to psychologists and literary theorists alike, is inherently concerned with giving our endings meanings, with creating illusions that make endings part of a comprehensible, hence meaningful and possibly acceptable whole. If the narrator of "Winter Rug" has gained any control over death, he has done so—as, perhaps, has his creator—by capturing it in a fiction.

Iftekharuddin,1997

"The New Aesthetics in Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970"
Farhat Iftekharuddin
Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story. Edwin Mellon Press, 1997, pp. 417-430.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

Literary innovations in the works of the 1960s took diverse forms. Writers continued to challenge on epistemological grounds linear story telling, with causal plots having beginnings, middles, and endings. To an extent these challenges emerged as a result of changes in American political and social thought patterns which necessitated new means of expression, or a different aesthetic. Bradbury states that in the fiction of the sixties:

"history is seen not as a haunting progress, but as a landscape of lunacy and pain; the doubting of a rational and intelligent history leads to a mocking of the world's substance, a sense of inner psychic disorder, a cartooning of character, a fantasizing of so-called 'facts' or actualities, and a comic denominalization."

He further observed that one direction in which fiction moved was "towards fantastic factuality, attempting to penetrate the fictionality of the real" (Bradbury 158).

One of the major definitions of the aesthetic for the fiction of the sixties can be seen in Barth's essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" in which he explains that writers faced "the used-upness of certain forms or exhaustion of certain possibilities." His own work, Lost in the Funhouse, seems to provide an alternative to this problem of "used-upness" or "exhaustion of . . . possibilities." In the "Author's Note," Barth provides a definition for his fiction: "It's neither a collection, nor a selection, but a series . . . meant to be received 'all at once' and as here arranged." Lost in the Funhouse is to make "something new and valid" (Funhouse 109). To Barth, the major issue is "how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our own time into material and means for his own work" (Barth "Exhaustion" 32).

Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s demonstrates another way to approach what Barth calls "felt ultimacies of our times." Vonnegut's intentions are to re-order our perceptions of life and of the world and re-evaluate our basis for meaning. In Slaughterhouse Five through the Tralfamadorian viewpoint, Vonnegut reveals his concept of fictional form by means of the Tralfamadorian notion that all time is continuously and eternally present. The description of the form of the Tralfamadorian novel is of course Vonnegut's attempt to describe his own work and that of contemporaries like Barthelme and Brautigan. Jerome Klinkowitz makes the point that:

"the Tralfamadorian novel, with its fragmentary paragraphs defying all traditional conventions and existing outside the continuum of linear time, is nothing other than Vonnegut's description of the appropriate form for fiction in the American 1960s."

Donald Barthelme plays a mathematical game of permutation and combination with language. Language, in essence words themselves, is the theme of Snow White: "Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!" Barthelme's primary concern is the way that language is used, and he enforces the way that his works are to be read. Using the techniques of deletion and various forms of combination of language and words themselves, Barthelme successfully represents the fragmentary nature of our contemporary lives. His best known stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning?" and "Views of My Father Weeping," are, as Klinkowitz observed:

"composed of Tralfamadorian-like 'lumps'—independent paragraphs whose principle of relation is more spatial than linear, because their effect depends upon the longer and wider view of the reader who considers them all at once, rather than in a sequential order building to a point." (Klinkowitz 59)

For Barthelme, structure was the key to ultimate realities, and since fiction is composed of words, Barthelme's focus was almost lexical. Klinkowitz's observation that "fiction breeds its own continuity" clearly defines the structural pattern of Barthelme's works, for this author picks with the delicacy of using chopsticks the structures and the phrases and the words from contemporary diction and arranges them in the fragments that form the collage that creates his new fiction: "The principle of collage," Barthelme explains to Richard Schickel, "is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century in all media" (Barthelme 15). And in a 1974 interview, he spoke with specific reference to fiction: "the point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best case, may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it came, and may also be much else. It's an itself." It is this "stuck together" form that gives his works their fragmentary look. It is interesting to note that the words of one of his own characters are so closely associated to being the approach of Barthelme himself:

"Here is the word and here are the knowledge knowers knowing. What can I tell you? What has been pieced together from the reports of travelers. Fragments are the only forms I trust. Look at my walls, it's all there."

Through such an approach, Barthelme was able successfully to capture the fragments of contemporary American life. Barthelme's "fragments" and Vonnegut's "Tralfamadorian clumps" are characteristics of the American new fiction. These authors achieved continuity within their works primarily through the exploitation of language and through spatial rather than linear connections between each segment of their works. This form of fictional innovation is characteristic of not only the writing of Barthelme and Vonnegut, but also of another American author, Richard Brautigan. It was the publication of Trout Fishing in America (1967) that gave Brautigan his prominence as a writer. His first published novel, however, was A Confederate General from Big Sur (1969). Brautigan wrote a total of nineteen books, among them nine novels and a collection of sixty-two short stories, Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970.

In 1964, a small magazine, Kulcher, in its Spring issue gave Richard Brautigan his first national exposure by publishing one of his short stories, "The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon." This short story revealed several techniques of Richard Brautigan that were to become central to the writer's art. One of the techniques easily identifiable in this story was Brautigan's art of synthesizing basic fancies with elegant poetic images (this technique would ultimately become an energizer of his fiction). "Post Offices of Eastern Oregon" is about a little boy out for a day's hunting with his uncle. As they pass an old farmhouse, the reader encounters the first of multiple images: "Nobody lives there. It was abandoned like a musical instrument"; and immediately following that, another: "There was a good pile of wood beside the house. Do ghosts burn wood? I guess it's up to them, but the wood was the color of years" (Brautigan 91). And when the boy and the uncle stop to look at a couple of dead bears on the front porch of an old house, the narrator informs us that "the house had wooden frosting all around the edges. It was a birthday cake from a previous century. Like candles we were going to stay there for the night" (Brautigan 93). It is not simply the image making power of Brautigan that provides the supercharge to the story; it is the uniqueness of the images also. Jerome Klinkowitz defines a typical Brautigan image as "a thought cast in such unfamiliar shape that no one in the straight culture could be expected to think of it first' (American 1960s 42). Not only are the images startling poetic products, but they are also vehicles of extension. Brautigan achieves his narrative form through the use of such extended images. One is not surprised that he should utilize such a method, since the story itself is generated (or perhaps regenerated), as the narrator informs us, from an image, "a photograph in the newspaper of Marilyn Monroe, dead from a sleeping pill suicide" (Brautigan 96). There are multiple extensions here: a process of actual images creating a series of mental associations—news of the death of the recollection of dead bears to the recollection of a nude image of Marilyn Monroe on a Oregon post office wall to hunting in the Oregon countryside. Such associations are possible because postmodernists like Brautigan operate on the basis that since life in the present culture is non-linear and fragmentary, fiction can best reflect that life by breaking from the traditional linearity of narrative to the non-linear and the fragmentary.

Brautigan covers a wide range in this collection, Revenge of the Lawn. There are stories where the postmodern trait of self-conscious construction of narrative breaks through, as in "The Literary Life in California/l964" where the narrator, after observing the indecisiveness of a book buyer retrieves the buyer's "reluctance" off the floor: "It was like clay but nervous and fidgeting I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this [meaning this story], having nothing better to do with my time" (Brautigan 130). Then there are others that are purely metaphysical in experience such as "Blackberry Motorist." The story begins innocently enough:

"This is not a place you went casually to gather a few blackberries for a pie or to eat with some milk and sugar on them. You went there because you were getting blackberries for the winter's jam or to sell them because you needed more money than the price of a movie." (Brautigan 81)

As the story progresses, however, the blackberries for jam turn into "black diamonds" and "it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle" (Brautigan 81-82). This is a castle of a blackberry patch where pickers can plummet fifteen feet down. The innocence has turned dark; a simple experience of picking blackberries for pies has turned into a painful reminder of a lost era, and recapturing the lost era requires an out of body experience:

"Sometimes when I got bored with picking blackberries I used to look into the deep shadowy dungeon—like places way down in the vines. You could see things that you couldn't make out down there and shapes that seemed to change like phantoms. Once I was so curious that I crouched down on the fifth plank of a bridge . . . until my eyes got used to the darkness and I saw a Model A sedan directly underneath me . . . It took me about two hours to tunnel my way with ripped clothes and many bleeding scratches into the front seat of that car with my hands on the steering wheel, a foot on the gas pedal, a foot on the brake, surrounded by the smell of castle-like upholstery and staring from twilight darkness through the windshield up into green sunny shadows." (Brautigan 82)

This collection is interspersed with stories that at first appear to be simply whimsical accounts. "Pale Marble Movie" is sparse in content and style till one encounters the surreal simile at the end:

"She lay there sound asleep with her wanderings over and mine just beginning. I have been thinking about this simple event for years now. It stays with me and repeats itself over and over again like a pale marble movie." (Brautigan 98)

For "Pale Marble Movie," the surreal ending acts as a reprieve; however, in "Getting to know Each Other" surreal images like "she used to lie in bed and pretend that she was still asleep, so as to catch the maid coming in with the morning light folded in her arms" add depth to a story with sinister implications about this girl who "wanted to see who her father was sleeping with" (Brautigan 103). But she knew "it was a little game of hers . . . kind of silly . . . because the women that her father went to bed with always looked just like her" (Brautigan 103).

Brautigan's genius lies in his ability to portray age old themes of human alienation, social envy, broken dreams, and loneliness in completely new presentations. Stories like "The Revenge of the Lawn," the title story, and "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" address the above issues in ways that are unique to Brautigan. "The Revenge of the Lawn" is a hilarious yet dark and horrifying account of the overbearing nature of human violence. The juxtaposition of the lack of emotion on the part of the narrator, a grandson, against the spontaneity of the violence he recounts, creates the disturbing picture of how twentieth-century humanity has become anesthetized by violence. The grandson relates the story of his grandfather, a minor mystic, who:

"prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state asylum... He believed he was six years old... and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872... until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to bake... He had a dark idea that being so short [less than five feet], so close to earth [that] his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start."

"It was a shame that the war started without him. If only he could have held back his childhood for another year, avoided that chocolate cake, all of his dreams would come true." (Brautigan 11)

The grandmother, a bootlegger, then takes a lover, Jack, who had stopped at the house "to sell her a lot just a stone's throw away from downtown Miami, and he was delivering her whiskey a week later. He stayed for thirty years and Florida went on without him" (Brautigan 10). This lover was bent on destroying the front yard that the grandfather so lovingly nurtured, "a place where" the grandfather's "powers came from" (Brautigan 11). But Jack cursed "the front yard as if it were a living thing." He "hated the front yard because he thought it was against him . . . and he refused to water it or take care of it in any way" (Brautigan 10). The yard, turned barren by neglect, fights back, finding nails to place under his tires, sinking the car during rainy season, and using bees as allies to force Jack into twice driving his car into the side of the house. The hilarity of events come to a grinding halt at the end of the story with the following revelation:

"The first time I remember anything in life occurred in my grandmother's front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937. I remember a man, probably Jack, cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene.

"It looked strange even for a first memory of life, to watch a man pour gallons and gallons of kerosene all over a tree lying stretched out thirty feet or so on the ground, and then to set fire to it while the fruit was still green on the branches." (Brautigan 14)

In this nearly epiphanic ending, the point that is gut-wrenching is the information that the first recollections of childhood, those formative years of conceptualization, are of unfettered violence. Brautigan uses violence or death to measure human failures. "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" opens with the word dead. From there the narrator catalogs in numerical order one through thirty-three the entire life of the dead man, his wife's father. It is a study in human failure, every success followed by a greater failure. At fifty-nine, the construction company laid him off from his bookkeeping job; "they said he was too old to take care of the books. 'It's time for you to go out to pasture,' they joked" (Brautigan 173-74). So "when his daughter was going to high school he was working there as school janitor. She saw him in the halls" (Brautigan 174). Ironically, the father's life had come nearly a full circle and collided uncomfortably with that of the daughter; and so, "his working as a janitor was a subject that was very seldom discussed at home" (Brautigan 174). If Brautigan was making a serious commentary on social emptiness, he has successfully and artfully done so in this story. The failures and disillusionment of an immigrant parent ironically runs counter to the integral concept of this country, the land of opportunities. Brautigan's people, however, are stoic in their resignation, graceful in their decline, always maintaining a sense of decorum in the face of solitude:

"28. He retired when he was sixty-five and became a very careful sweet wine alcoholic. He liked to drink whiskey but they couldn't afford to keep him in it. He stayed in the house most of the time and started drinking about ten o'clock, a few hours after his wife had gone off to work at the grocery store.

"29. He would get quietly drunk during the course of the day... He very seldom made any bad scenes and the house was always clean when his wife got home from work. He did though after a while take on that meticulous manner of walking that alcoholics have when they are trying very carefully to act as if they aren't drunk." (Brautigan 174)

For this hard-working immigrant, dreams have given way to the false security of inebriation. Thus,

"30. He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use." (Brautigan 174)

Stories like "Revenge of the Lawn" or "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane" are postmodern in form, but they are not games of artifice; they are mirrors reflecting certain realities told with a sense of innocence that is frightening: "Always at the end of the words somebody is dead" (Brautigan 170).

Brautigan's appeal lies in his ability to capture a basic vulnerability, to encapsulate a nakedness and transform that into a sad burlesque. Take for instance the events within "Complicated Banking Problems?." The narrator tells us that he has a bank account because he "grew tired of burying [his] money in the back yard" (Brautigan 44) plus the fact that on one occasion he dug up a skeleton holding a "shovel in one hand and a half-dissolved coffee can in the other hand. The coffee can was filled with a kind of rustdust material that I think was once money, so now I have a bank account" (Brautigan 44). But having an account has its problems. He is always ill-fated to be in a line behind people with complicated banking problems:

"The check in my hand is for ten dollars.

"The next two people in line are actually one person. They are a pair of Siamese twins, but they each have their own bank books. One of them is putting eighty-two dollars in his savings account and the other one is closing his savings account.

"The last person between me and the teller is totally anonymous looking... He puts 273 checks down on the counter that he wants to deposit in his checking account... [and] also 611 checks that he wants to deposit in his savings account. His checks completely cover the counter like a success snow storm... I stand there thinking that the skeleton in the back yard had made the right decision after all." (Brautigan 45-46)

Almost anything becomes a story in Brautigan's hands, and sometimes his stories may appear to be whimsical, but they are not; there is always a context and a degree of complexity embedded in his stories. Take for instance "The Scarlatti Tilt." Here is the entire text:

"'It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin.' That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver." (Brautigan 50)

Through sheer economy of language, Brautigan captures a representative social insanity; "The Scarlatti Tilt" works as narrative only because it is a microcosmic embodiment of twentieth century intolerance and social ennui. "The Gathering of a Californian," a slightly larger piece, acquires its completeness from the same economy of language. The opening and closing paragraphs of this story are only two sentences that capture first, the suffocating and impersonal quality of California and secondly, the transformation into dehumanization of those who were drawn into California:

"Like most Californians, I came from some place else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more . . .

"It's strange that California likes to get her people from every place else and leave what we knew behind and here to California we are gathered as if energy itself, the shadow of that metal-eating flower, had summoned us away from other lives and now to do the California until the very end like the Taj Mahal in the shape of a parking meter." (Brautigan 25)

Synaesthetic similes make this compact and complete story larger than the half a page that it physically occupies. The entire collection is strewn with such synaesthetic images:

"The door was tall, silent, and human like a middle-aged woman. I felt as if I were touching her hand when I opened the door delicately like the inside of a watch. ("1962 Cotton Mather Newsreel" 17)

"Like some strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. As the radio gently burned, the flames began to affect the songs #1 on the Top-40 . . . dropped to #13 inside of itself . . . #9 became #27 in middle of a chorus . . . They tumbled like broken birds. Then it was too late for all of them. ("Pacific Radio Fire" 29)

"There was the jar of instant coffee, the empty cup and the spoon all laid out like a funeral service... When I left the house ten minutes later, the cup of coffee [was] safely inside me like a grave. ("Coffee" 35)

"She makes all his dreams come true as she lies there like a simple contended theater in his touching. ("An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimeter Film" 49)

"I smelled like the complete history of America." ("The Auction?" 123)

The subtle wit involved in these and other images soften the harshness of the anger, the pain and the loss that permeates these stories.

"Corporal," a tightly constructed story, contains vivid examples of frustration and disillusionment. A poor school boy during World War II enters a paper drive designed like "military career"; he had "visions of being a general." He realized early that it took "tons of paper to be a general," but he had also concluded that it would be "simple to gather enough paper to be a general" (Brautigan 118). After painfully accumulating piles of paper, he realized it was just enough to move him from a private to a corporal. Broken and frustrated he "takes his God-damn little private's stripe home in the absolute bottom of [his] pocket" (Brautigan 119). He realizes that he failed in his entrepreneurship because:

"the kids who wore the best clothes and had a lot of spending money and got to eat hot lunch every day were already generals. They had know where there were a lot of magazines and their parents had cars. . . The next day, I brought a halt to my glorious career and entered into the disenchanted paper shadows of America where failure is a bounced check or a bad report card or a letter ending a love affair and all the words that hurt people when they read them." (Brautigan 119-20)

This epiphanic summation points not simply to the failed young entrepreneur, but also to a failed society.

Almost each story in Revenge of the Lawn works toward awakening us to a recognition of ourselves, but they do not jolt us into that awakening like a huge pill does as it asserts its presence in its slow descent through the esophagus; on the contrary, these stories are coated with the gentle voice of the author and tempered with a human sensibility that, while drawing our attention to the painful world around us, does not drown us in sentimentality. Brautigan accomplishes his task by means of brilliant uncommon images, subtle wit, and magically apt metaphors such as in "Lint":

"I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happen like lint." (Brautigan 121)

This kind of frugality of language magnifies the complexity of each of the stories.

Writing counter to the conventional form, Brautigan creates a new dimension for his fiction, and that dimension belies rational order. Thus, the reader has to find cohesion in his stories through imaginative discourse. This is Brautigan's new aesthetic—spontaneous fiction that expands the vision and the experience through multiplicity, synaesthetic similes, juxtaposition of images and extraordinary metaphors. A long time ago Emerson asked a very relevant question, "Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition?" Brautigan's stories show that we can. Although his fictional form veers from the traditional, his thematic concerns on the whole do not. It has often been noted that Brautigan is akin to Ernest Hemingway in his treatment of human conditions in relation to nature, and in his very sensitivity to nature itself: "tracking the ghost of his childhood through the Pacific mist, Brautigan tends to sound like the Hemingway of the Nick Adams stories." (Duberstein)

How far any author stretches from the conventional depends on where one sets the conventional. Brautigan is no iconoclast—his deviation may be from the conventions of the thirties, but he is definitely in line with the conventions of the sixties and the seventies. Brautigan's major deviation, like those of his contemporaries, is in the area of form—especially a deviation from the plot lines. Using the synthesizing power of the imagination Brautigan's intent is to create a "modern text, dissolving old natural narrative" (Klinkowitz, "The American 1960s" 44). Malcolm Bradbury rightly stresses the factor that Brautigan writes about the

"ironizing of the world, the waning of pastoral myths of innocence and of escape from social constriction into nature; he shows the power of old images and then of the endeavors of the imagination to dissolve them, both through the struggle of his fictional outsiders, and of the poetic imagination itself. If the world wanes, the writer's exuberant comic imagination thrives; form in its collapse promises recovery, the fixities of time, space, and ideology dissolve." (Brautigan 170)

What evolves is a revitalized form of the genre itself where the reader comes to grips with the idea that Brautigan's works do not merely mirror life, that they are not pseudo-realistic documents, and that the value of his works cannot be judged simply on the basis of their social, moral, political, or commercial value, but that they should be judged, if they must be, for what they are and what they do as an art form.

Critics have argued that the works of postmodern writers such as Brautigan revealed the language crisis of the times. They comment on the collapse of the traditional format and blame it on the late twentieth-century historical, moral, and political condition. Of course, it is always debatable whether postmodernism is actually the dominant style of the times as it is with other forms of styles of other genres, but what is a surety is that the works of postmodernists have raised initial questions regarding formal structure. Although many may disagree with the forms created by postmodernists, what is undeniable is a striking vitality in their works. Some American writers as Bradbury states, "are self-conscious fictionalists, others playful or serious users of fantasy and grotesquerie; some are writers of intense historical preoccupations, others primarily concerned with the formation of text" (Brautigan 163). Works of novelists like Pynchon are marked by excess and mass; works of Barthelme are marked by reductive economy of language, dwelling on lessness and fragmentation; and there is Richard Brautigan whose works cover a variety of styles including parody, self-conscious fictionality, grotesquerie, and fantasy. Uniqueness of images often created with the greatest economy of language is a mark of Brautigan's linguistic fortitude. Brautigan offers the notion that depth of observation, the creation of magical images out of trivial, mundane, everyday objects combined with the frugality of language and presented with stylistic ease within an open-ended free flowing structure are the ingredients of a new aesthetics.

McClanahanMy,1998

"Endnote"
Ed McClanahan
My Vita, If You Will: The Uncollected Ed McClanahan, Counterpoint, 1998, pp. 129-135.
NOTE: The following material may be protected under copyright. It is used here for archival, educational, and research purposes, not for commercial gain or public distribution. Individuals using this material should respect the author's rights in any use of this material.

I first heard of Richard Brautigan's work in 1967 when I came across a fragment of graffiti in, of all places, the faculty men's room of the Stanford English Department, which read enigmatically, "TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA IS THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL!" And sure enough, at least for the time being, it was! When I finally came across the book a few days later—and not in the outdoor sports section, either—I immediately fell for it ass-over-teacups, this cryptic, idiosyncratic, strangely poignant little haiku of a novel—perhaps I should say "novel," since I'd never read anything remotely like it in any genre—with its improbable title and its Zen sensibilities and sly, subtle humor. Nor were the men's room scholar and I alone in our enthusiasm, for within weeks, Trout Fishing was a national sensation, and Brautigan was a famous man.

During the next few years his fame was much enhanced by his publisher's (or his publicist's, or his own) brilliant ploy of gracing the front cover of each new book with a photograph of its distinctively goofy-looking author—almost absurdly tall and lanky, with an immense Andy Gump mustache, granny glasses, and an outlandish hat—always accompanied by his current girlfriend, who was herself usually something of an eye-catcher. He changed girlfriends with every new edition—thereby making of his book jackets a sort of ongoing mini-soap opera, a prefiguration, perhaps, of today's Taster's Choice TV commercials.

(Curiously, when Revenge of the Lawn came out, they dropped Richard altogether from the picture in favor of a photo of his new girlfriend—a petite, pretty young woman with big, dark eyes and a winsome smile—all by herself. Nonetheless, the style of the cover was by then so familiar that one instantly recognized the book as the latest Brautigan, almost as though Richard were a ghostly presence haunting the photograph, as faint—and as indelible—as a premonition.)

At any rate, no one would ever dream of putting Gurney Norman and me in a soap opera, but we'd already been (as we still are) particular friends for many years, from our Bob Hazel days at UK; we'd both landed in California in the early sixties, thanks to mutual Stegner fellowships at Stanford, and both of us had somehow managed to hang on and become resident rustics in paradise. Eventually, we took neighboring twenty-five-dollar-a-month offices on the second floor of a derelict old Palo Alto office building known as the Poppycock, after the rock-'n'-roll-'n'-fish-'n'-chips joint downstairs. In 1970, we'd collaborated on a piece for Esquire about the new publishing phenomenon The Whole Earth Catalog. So when the opportunity to do it again presented itself—in the form of a review of Revenge of the Lawn, probably the only collaborative review between, say, Addison and Steele and Siskel and Ebert—we didn't have to think twice before we jumped at the chance.

I'd met Richard several times by then, at readings and parties, and I'd come to like him very much. He could be fey to the point of utter silliness (as when he insisted on reading "poems" by kindergartners to an audience of Stanford English majors) or as petulant as the veriest prima donna (as when he walked out of his own reading because a carpenter was rattling around backstage). But he was also sweet and charming and funny, and he enjoyed his newfound celebrity enormously and was rumored to delight above all things in lavishly entertaining his friends with the fruits of his success.

So when Richard liked our review enough to invite Gurney and me to lunch in San Francisco, biscuit mongers that we are, we could hardly wait. The day we were to go happened also to be the day our friend Ken Kesey was to fly in from Oregon for a two-day eminence-in-residence gig at Stanford. Ken planned to stay at my house in Palo Alto, and Gurney and I had agreed to pick him up at the airport late that afternoon; we'd have lunch with Richard, we figured, then hang around the city for a couple of hours, and meet Ken's 4:30 plane on our way home.

We neglected, however, to reckon with Richard's own agenda for the occasion, in accordance with which, when we arrived at his house in San Francisco at noon, our amiable host greeted his two jug-o'-Gallo Kentucky colonels with a spanking-new fifth of Maker's Mark bourbon at the ready. The cocktail hour, it seemed, was punching in a little previous that day.

It took Richard and me a good hour and a half of diminishingly coherent literary conversation to polish off the fifth. (Gurney was driving and, responsible citizen that he is, he wouldn't help us much.) Then the three of us hit the streets in a state of high bonhomie and somehow wended our way, under Richard's rather abstruse direction, to a big, fancy Japanese restaurant, where we tucked into a muchness of inscrutable Oriental comestibles while as the afternoon careened along, Richard and I steeped our faculties in martinis, sake, Pouilly-Fuissé—Richard loved Pouilly-Fuissé—topped off with a beaker or three of Courvoisier, and generally had ourselves a raraparooza of a fine old time.

Everybody knows that tempus fugits when you're having whatever gets you off, so four o'clock shouldn't have come as quite so much of a surprise—but suddenly Gurney and I are saying, Uh, lissen, Richard, we hate to eat and run, but we gotta get to the airport, see, to pick up Kesey, so we'd better... And Richard sez, Kesey? Hey, I'll go with you! And we sez, Sure, fine, but, um, what then? And Richard sez, Why, we'll come back to the city and... and go out to dinner!

So that's what we did. We left the Japanese restaurant and hightailed it down the Bayshore Freeway in Gurney's VW bus and scooped up Ken at the airport and hightailed it back up to San Francisco and went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

But did I mention that no sooner was Ken in the bus than we were wreathed in the sickly sweet blue smaze of the dread devil weed? Or that upon our return to San Francisco we did make a quick pit stop at a liquor store for yet another celebratory fifth of Maker's Mark? Or that this naturally required us to drop by Richard's house again in order to drink it?

While we were there, Richard called the aforementioned current girlfriend—i.e., the Revenge girlfriend—and invited her to join our happy number. She turned out to be a young San Francisco schoolteacher named Sherry—altogether as winsome as she'd been on the cover of the book—who'd come west from, of all places, Louisville, Kentucky! This development occasioned many a toast to southern womanhood, to such an extent that this bottle of Maker's also shortly disappeared to the very last drop. Once again, the incorruptible Gurney had declined to help us much, so Ken and Richard and I resigned ourselves to carrying the load.

After that, it got a little drunk out. Richard called ahead to the Chinese restaurant and reserved a huge booth and ordered up a feast called, cross my heart, The Feast, which to my befuckled and befoggled recollection consisted largely of several great big fishes staring stonily up at me from bright red platters, and yet another deluge of what I was by then referring to as Pooly-Foosy or, alternatively, Fooly-Poosy.

Afterward, we somehow made our way to Enrico's, a North Beach sidewalk café where the main attraction (aside from the Irish coffee, of which we soon put away an insupportable quantity) is in spotting cheesy local celebrities among the passersby. "There goes Mel Belli!" the patrons would cry. "There goes Carol Doda! There go the Mitchell Brothers!" Along about the third or fourth Irish coffee, Richard decided—let's assume unjustly—that Ken was hitting on Sherry, and took umbrage, and fell into a pout. I, meanwhile, was seeing celebrities who weren't even there: "There goes Ambrose Bierce! There goes Bishop Pike!"

Gurney, that Philistine, had long since gone off for a meditative stroll around North Beach. His meanderings eventually brought him back past Enrico's, whereupon Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey—despite their differences—leapt to their feet in unison and cried in a single voice, "There goes Gurney Norman!" Gurney swears he didn't plan it that way, but I don't intend to believe him until he agrees to forget that I rode all the way home to Palo Alto that night with my head in his lap, while Ken snored mightily in the backseat.

Gurney awakened us from our slumbers by some stratagem like hollering "Fire! Fire!" as he pulled into my driveway, and then politely reminded us not to let the car door hit us in the ass as we got out. Ken and I, roaring like a pair of Vikings on shore leave, staggered into the house and caroused our way as far as the kitchen, where we somehow got our several legs entangled and went crashing to the floor, four hundred and fifty pounds of authorial omniscience rattling that big old redwood barn right to the rafters and alerting my entire household to the stately and dignified return of the lord of the manor and his distinguished guest.

Twelve hours later, when I came to, there was much—very much—of the preceding day that had escaped my memory, but one thing remained luminously clear: from the first Oriental inscrutables to the last Irish coffee, from the first drop of Maker's Mark to the last drop of Poozley-Foozley, Richard had paid for everything.

I saw Richard two or three times over the next few years, the last in Livingston, Montana, in 1975 when I was teaching at the University of Montana in Missoula. I was in Livingston for an overnight visit with my writer friend Bill "Gatz" Hjortsberg and his wife, Marian, who were part of the community of writers, artists, and Hollywood expatriates that had assembled there around the novelist and film director Tom McGuane. Richard's success had by that time bought him hideaways both in Bolinas, on the California coast north of San Francisco, and in Livingston, where he had a place just down the road from the Hjortsbergs' little spread.

So okay, I admit that Gatz and Richard and I did go out drinking that night, but there's no particular reason to subject my hungover reader to still more boozy hijinks. I will mention, though, that the next morning I had coffee with Richard in his writing room in the loft of a stable on his ranch, and he showed me an enormous handgun and pointed out the bullet holes he'd blasted in the walls and ceiling. At the time, I got a good chuckle out of this latest Brautigan eccentricity, but that moment would become, in later years, a disquieting and painful memory.

In 1976 I moved back home to Kentucky permanently. I pretty much lost touch with Richard after that, although I did occasionally hear about him over the years, via West Coast and Montana friends. By the early eighties, the word was that he wasn't doing so hot; his career hadn't been going well, and neither had his love life. His attempt at a screenplay hadn't worked out, sales of his books were in decline, and there'd been an unfortunate marriage followed by the inevitable expensive divorce.

In 1984, when I was living in the tiny northern Kentucky community of Port Royal, I got a phone call one day from, of all people, Sherry. Amazingly, she and her new husband had just moved into a house about a mile down the road from me. After we recovered from our astonishment at the mysterious workings of a destiny that would bring the two of us, who had crossed paths just once on a crazy night fourteen years before, back together on a microscopic dot on the planet twenty-five hundred miles from where we'd met, I finally got around to asking what she'd heard from Richard lately. Well, she said, I hate to tell you this, but the day before yesterday I got a call from an old friend of Richard's, and he told me that Richard... died.

C'mon! I said. Richard's dead? What happened?

Well, said Sherry, they found him in his house in Bolinas. They say he shot himself.